Last summer, Congress approved the most sweeping reforms to the financial market regulatory system since the Great Depression with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. But that was only the beginning. Now come the details—hammering out more than 250 rules...

The sixth annual Community Bankers Symposium, co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), was held at the Chicago Fed on November 19, 2010. This article summarizes the key presentations and discussions at the conference.

One of the changes introduced by the sweeping new financial market legislation of the Dodd–Frank Act is the provision of a formal process for liquidating large financial firms—something that would have been useful in 2008, when troubles at Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Merrill Lynch threatened...

This paper analyses all final merger decisions by the European Commission from the beginning of 1990 up to the end of 2019. We use a novel dataset, containing information about 6245 merger cases from all economic sectors and combining all sorts of decisions, inclusive of withdrawn and prohibited...

The regulatory and institutional environment of a nation plays a critical role in shaping the level of entrepreneurship. By creating a conducive regulatory and institutional environment, governments can encourage entrepreneurial activity, leading to job creation, innovation, and economic growth....

We propose a general framework to assess merger policy effectiveness based on standard oligopoly theory and stock market reactions. We focus on four different dimensions of effectiveness: 1) legal certainty, 2) decision errors, 3) reversion of anti-competitive rents, and 4) deterrence. We apply...

This paper describes the privatization program in Italy during the 1990s and puts that policy in the context of macroeconomic adjustment, general market deregulation, and promotion of private investment in the provision of public infrastructure. The wave of state divestitures reached Italy later...

This paper reviews the state of knowledge on the effectiveness of donor interventions aimed at improving the regulatory environment for private sector development in developing countries. Where regulatory reform is undertaken, the expectation is that there will be improvements to economic and...

The research agenda of Europeanization is currently highly focused on issued related to what accounts for the 'horizontal' interaction between domestic actors and how these actors make use of stimuli originating from the EU. This paper aims to contribute to this line of inquiry through the case...

Based on a database of 326 merger cases scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and 2007, we evaluate the economic impact of the change in European merger legislation in 2004. We ?rst propose a general framework to assess merger policy effectiveness, which is based on standard...