This is a chapter for a forthcoming volume Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press 2014) (eds. Eilís Ferran, Niamh Moloney, and Jennifer Payne). It provides an overview of EU financial regulation from the first banking directive up until its most recent developments in...

The Dodd-Frank Act, enacted after the global financial crisis, requires U.S. financial regulators to define and regulate systemically risky firms and activities — a truly Sisyphean task. In this Essay, we identify two paths regulators have taken: a “descriptive approach,” which involves...

In an earlier companion essay, Regulating in the Dark, I contended that there is a systemic pattern in major U.S. financial regulation: (i) enactment is invariably crisis driven, adopted at a time when there is a paucity of information regarding what has transpired, (ii) resulting in...

Deference mechanisms, such as substituted compliance and equivalence, serve important purposes: They open up markets to foreign service providers, avoid double regulation, and reduce market fragmentation. Yet, their current design also has considerable weaknesses. The biggest of these is that...

This paper contributes to the debate on the adequate regulatory treatment of non-bank financial intermediation (NBFI). It proposes an avenue for regulators to keep regulatory arbitrage under control and preserve sufficient space for efficient financial innovation at the same time. We argue for a...

This chapter reviews short selling practices in emerging markets and market performances during the global financial crisis. In contrast to developed markets, many emerging countries do not permit short selling, which can pose severe limitations on market liquidity. We compare market volatility,...

We explore the role of financial openness – capital account openness and gross capital inflows – and a newly constructed gravity-based contagion index to assess the importance of these factors in the run-up to currency crises. Using a quarterly data set of 46 advanced and emerging market...

The recent financial crisis has triggered a major rethink of analytical approaches and policy towards financial stability. The crisis has encouraged a sharper focus on systemic risk, the inclusion of a financial sector in macroeconomic models, a shift from a microprudential to a macroprudential...