The SEC has long taken a hands-off approach to private markets. Instead of direct regulation, the SEC has used investor access restrictions to create high-end contracting environments where investors (in theory) have the resources needed to fend for themselves. But in early 2022, this hands-off...

The introduction of the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation into EU law provides a unique opportunity to obtain an in-depth understanding of repo markets. Based on the transaction-level data reported under the regulation, this paper presents an overview and key facts about the euro area...

This paper considers the debate about the "macro-prudential regulation" of finance in the context of a broader view of the relation of finance to the real economy. Five ideas are central to the argument. The first idea is that the two dominant families of ideas about finance and its regulation...

The European Central Bank (ECB) will offer to banks in 2013 an european shared platform for securities settlement, named TARGET 2 Securities (T2S), in order to open the national financial markets. The financial crisis did not change the ECB agenda. This paper develops a spatial competition model...

We examine the profitability of stock trades executed by SEC employees. Subject to the considerable constraints of the data (no portfolio information, occupational details, or individual identifiers and inability to determine actual profitability of trades), we find that a hedge portfolio...