In 2010, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank”) in response to the collapse of the United States economy. Congress and President Obama partially attributed the recession to the failure of financial regulation. Dodd-Frank gave the SEC a...

In summer 2007, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published an online tool with information on firms doing business in State Sponsor of Terrorism countries. We take sides with those arguing that for moral reasons, investors will have traded on the information provided in the tool by...

Today policymakers in all the countries, shocked by the financial crisis of the 2007-2008, are reconsidering carefully the features of their supervisory regimes. This paper reviews the changing face of the financial supervisory regimes introducing new indicators to measure the level of...

We investigate the effectiveness of regulatory oversight exercised by the SEC against auditors over the years 1996-2009. The evidence suggests that the SEC is significantly less likely to name a Big N auditor as a defendant, after controlling for both the severity of the violation and for the...

This paper documents the features of a new database that focuses on changes in the intensity in the usage of several widely used prudential tools, taking into account both macro-prudential and micro-prudential objectives.The database coverage is broad, spanning 64 countries, and with quarterly...

This paper studies how financial intermediation varies across banks. Bank size is a first-order determinant of banks' capital structure in the cross-section. Largest banks have the lowest capital-to-asset ratio and the lowest ratio of Tier-1 capital against risk-weighted assets. These large...

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...

We empirically investigate whether increases in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) budget have an effect on firms' compliance behavior with securities market rules. Our study uses a dataset on the SEC's resources and its enforcement actions over a period beginning shortly after...

We identify current challenges for creating stable, yet efficient financial systems using lessons from recent and past crises. Reforms need to start from three tenets: adopting a system-wide perspective explicitly aimed at addressing market failures; understanding and incorporating into...