In this paper, we describe the evolution of the Federal Reserve's swap lines from their inception in 1962 as a mechanism to forestall claims on US gold reserves under Bretton Woods to their use during the Great Recession as a means of extending emergency dollar liquidity. We describe the Federal...

Are regulatory interventions delayed reactions to market failures or can regulators proactively pre-empt corporate misbehavior? From a public interest view, we would expect “effective” regulation to ex ante mitigate agency conflicts between corporate insiders and outsiders, and prevent...

In this paper, I consider the case of supervisory cooperation among bank regulators where voluntary cooperation (soft law) over a period of 50 years has become hard law (regulations and directives) within the European Union. Driven by major international bank failures or financial crises,...

We investigate whether the role of national currencies as international reserves was fundamentally altered by the shift from fixed to flexible exchange rates (what we call the “upheaval hypothesis”), a view that gained adherents following the collapse of the Bretton Woods System. We extend...

I estimate the transmission of large global volatility shocks in international equity markets from the earlier (pre-1914) to the modern era of globalisation. To that end, I identify 43 such shocks over the period 1885-2011, defined as significant increases in unanticipated volatility in US...

It is somehow common understanding that MFI have better Portfolio at Risk ratios than commercial banks. The present article shows evidence that this thesis is not valid (anymore). Out of six randomly chosen countries with sufficient data, five confirm the thesis

This "white paper," written for the Roosevelt Institute, looks at the Dodd-Frank Orderly Liquidation Authority, as currently conceived of by regulators. The existence of OLA is crucial to the idea that the Dodd-Frank Act has actually ended "too big to fail." Since financial institutions remain...

This paper examines the nature of state capital, its increasing prevalence and impacts in the global economy, and the implications of current state capital trends for Australia. The paper classifies several key state capital actors and maps their scale, scope and investment strategies in both...