Measuring Financial Regulation Architectures and the Role of the Central Banks : The Financial Supervision Herfindahl Hirschman Index

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 consolidation in supervision and the degree of the involvement of the central banks. We show that the new Financial Supervision Herfindahl Hirschman Indexes are (i) consistent with the previous one, (ii) but at the same time more precise, (iii) more robust, given that there we exclude subjective weights and (iv) more easy to use and interpret, given that it applies a well-know methodology of measurement