We examine the impact of stock exchange trading rules and surveillance on the frequency and severity of suspected insider trading cases in 22 stock exchanges around the world over the period January 2003 through June 2011. Using new indices for market manipulation, insider trading, and...

We propose the realized systemic risk beta as a measure for financial companies' contribution to systemic risk given network interdependence between firms' tail risk exposures. Conditional on statistically pre-identified network spillover effects and market as well as balance sheet information,...

Although financial development is good for long-term growth, not all countries pursue policies that render full financial development. This paper builds on an extensive political economy literature to construct a theoretical model showing that the intensity of opposition to financial development...

This paper studies the optimality of a banking union in a setting with cross-country liquidity spillovers and moral hazard. Generally, the banking union improves welfare by efficiently providing liquidity to banks, thus limiting spillovers from bank defaults across the member countries. At the...

We exploit the introduction of free banking laws in US states during the 1837-1863 period to examine the impact of removing barriers to bank entry on bank competition and economic growth. As governments were not concerned about systemic stability in this period, we are able to isolate the...

This paper studies regulatory competition in the banking sector in a model where banks are heterogeneous and taxpayers come up for the losses of failing banks. Capital requirements force the weakest banks to exit the market. This gives rise to a signalling effect of capital standards, as...

This paper examines the impact of implicit guarantees and capital regulations on the behavior of a bank and on the expected losses for its depositors. I show that implicit guarantees increase the incentives of the bank to enhance leverage and/or risk taking and that this leads to higher expected...

This paper has two main purposes. The first is to present, to analyze and to suggest road infrastructure investment and financing policies in Brazil. The second objective is to analyze toll road concessions, with emphasis on toll tariffs. For the last eight years federal road investment (at...

Acknowledged the importance of the Road transportation to Brazilian economy, especially when considering cargo transportation, Ipea has studied the main economical and institutional problems that involve Brazilian roads. Firstly, we present an overview of the road system from 1950's expansion to...

The present work discusses the main economical and institutional problems that involve the Brazilian railway system. Firstly, we characterize the segment, presenting the main concepts and a short overview of Brazilian railways, it's history and managing institutions. Next, we present a short...