We review the competing explanations of the 2007-2008 global crisis, recall how governments around the world had to depart from established policy stances, and reflect on the legacy of the crisis both in terms of future challenges and changes in policy doctrine. The G-20 has addressed important...

With the Great Recession and the regulatory reform that followed, the search for reliable means to capture systemic risk and to detect macrofinancial problems has become a central concern. In the United States, this concern has been institutionalized through the Financial Stability Oversight...

Over the past 40 years, regulatory reforms have been undertaken on the assumption that markets are efficient and self-corrective, crises are random events that are unpreventable, the purpose of an economic system is to grow, and economic growth necessarily improves well-being. This narrow...

Objectives-based legislation - or laws which focus on achieving particular and concrete outcomes - has become a new and important tool that financial sector regulators use to tackle large and varied financial system risks. Yet, objectives-based legislation - and the frequent principles-based...

Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...

Despite a heated debate on the perceived increasing complexity of financial regulation, there is no available measure of regulatory complexity other than the mere length of regulatory documents. To fill this gap, we propose to apply simple measures from the computer science literature by...

We summarize and evaluate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's credit risk transfer (CRT) programs, which have been used since 2013 to shift a portion of credit risk on more than $1.8 trillion of mortgages to private sector investors. We argue that the CRT programs have been successful in reducing the...

Virtual currencies are a contemporary form of private money. Thanks to their technological properties, their global transaction networks are relatively safe, transparent, and fast. This gives them good prospects for further development. However, they remain unlikely to challenge the dominant...

The attention for the governance of financial sector supervisors is of a recent date. The debate has risen to the fore as part of the wider discussion about the appropriate institutional organization of financial supervision and the drive for compliance with international best practices in the...