Responding to the dramatic price declines during the COVID-19 pandemic, six European countries introduced short-selling bans in March 2020. We analyze how these restrictions affected the market quality by comparing countries with and without bans. We observe for ban countries relatively lower...

The central point of this paper is to present the results of comparative case study research concerning the impact of the interplay between formal and informal institutions in the corporate governance systems (CGS) of Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC). Particular focus was put on the...

This paper focuses on a major difference between markets for physical goods and for services. It is argued that dishonest sellers of physical goods are eventually identified and forced to leave the market. In contrast, dishonest sellers of services can effectively mimic honest competitors and...

Banks failed in 2008 because individuals with knowledge of risks were not connected to individuals who had the incentive and power to take corrective action. Evidence of this problem is provided by reports from the Lehman liquidator and The US Government Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission....

Consumers often cannot judge the quality of goods and services at the time of the purchase decision. The goodwill model explains how the market participants deal with this problem. It makes a distinction between markets for search goods, experience goods and credence goods. In markets for...

This policy paper offers a synthesis of research on privatisation and its impacts on the utilities sector in different countries. It identifies issues to be considered by policy makers concerned with economic reform, including the implications of sequencing privatisation together with...

For nearly half a century, the bundling of research services into commissions that paid for the execution of securities trades has been the focus of both policy discussion and academic debate. The practice whereby asset management firms make use of investor funds to cover the costs of research,...

This paper, written for a Conference on Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) of Financial Regulation held at the University of Chicago in October 2013, analyzes the institutional framework that has historically governed the CBA of financial regulation. Although U.S. financial regulators are often...

Cost-benefit analysis of financial regulation (CBA/FR) has become a flashpoint in contemporary legal and political debates, partly due to the Dodd-Frank Act. Yet debates over CBA/FR exhibit terminological confusion, and CBA/FR advocacy has outrun the possible, given data limitations and current...

Many regulators have concluded that cost-benefit analysis is the best available method for capturing the welfare effects of regulations. It is therefore understandable that in recent years, some people have been interested in requiring financial regulators to engage in careful cost-benefit...