Information production is key to the efficiency of financial markets. Does selling information separately improve its production? We investigate this question using MiFID II, a European regulation that unbundles research from transactions. We show that unbundling causes fewer research analysts...

The financial service industry is becoming increasingly complex and more difficult to regulate. This brief describes broker-dealers and investment advisers—their numbers, size, assets, clients, services, and affiliations—and examines whether individual investors understand the differences...

These slides summarize a paper which offers the psychological attraction approach to accounting and disclosure rules, regulation, and policy as a program for positive accounting research. We suggest that psychological forces have shaped and continue to shape rules and policies in two different...

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based technologies represent one of the most debated topics in the financial services landscape. In this respect, during the past months several institutional investors, and namely hedge funds and their managers, have demonstrated a growing interest in the...

In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), financial technology has been growing rapidly and is on the agenda of many policy makers. Fintech provides opportunities to deepen financial development, competition, innovation, and inclusion in the region but also creates new and only partially...

This article discusses the Samp;L crisis. Proposed solutions are discussed in the context of the industry as it currently stands. With a somewhat similar liability structure to that of banks (mainly short-term deposits), the asset structure of Samp;Ls is quite different. Whereas banks assets...

This study is designed to examine the effect of the CRA on the financial performance of 60 banks. For this sample of banks, performance measures such as return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), salary expense ratios improve significantly in the five year period after the passage of the...

This paper studies the economic scale of financial institutions. We show that banks and security broker-dealers actively smooth book equity by adjusting payouts. The smoothing of book equity is associated with procyclical book leverage and procyclical net payouts. In contrast, market leverage...

I investigate whether or not the multi-period trades of financial institutions cause mispricing in the stock market. After controlling for the magnitude and trends in institutional trades, I find evidence consistent with institutional trades pushing prices away from fundamentals. Stocks heavily...

The seeds for the 2007-09 financial collapse were sewn over many years and nurtured by ill-advised governmental housing policy, the presence of pervasive fraud both large and small and the widespread failure of personal integrity. A chronology of bad choices made by individuals and the...