The literature stresses the importance of financial market characteristics in determining the supervisory architectures. In the real world it is not always clear to what extent market features are taken into account. We present two complementary approaches to gain insights in the above...

Compared with the case of central bank independence, independence for financial sector supervisors remains more controversial. This paper analyzes changes in independence and accountability arrangements in a set of 32 countries that overhauled their legal and/or institutional frameworks for...

Good regulatory governance in the financial system is a critical component of financial stability. Research on the topic has not been very systematic and deep. This paper first defines four key components of regulatory governance independence, accountability, transparency, and integrity. It...

Despite its importance, the issue of financial sector regulatory and supervisory independence (RSI) has received only marginal attention in literature and practice. However, experience has demonstrated that improper supervisory arrangements have contributed significantly to the deepening of...

This paper provides empirical evidence that the quality of regulatory governance governance practices adopted by financial system regulators and supervisors matters for financial system soundness. The paper constructs indices of financial system soundness and regulatory governance, based on...

Against the background of the debate on the advisability of further centralizing prudential supervision in the EU this paper develops a study of applied institutional economics, analyzing the financial supervisory architecture of each of the 27 EU countries and assesses their degree of...

Almost all literature on the evolution of financial supervision architecture stresses the importance of financial market characteristics in determining the recent trend toward more unification. In the real world, however, it is not always clear to what extent market features are important. We...

This paper investigates the role that International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs and capacity building play in fostering structural reforms. To do so, we exploit two novel datasets on IMF capacity building and structural reforms available for over one hundred IMF member countries over the period...

We examine the relationship between South African Rand and gold price volatility using monthly data for the period 1980-2010. Our main findings is that prior to capital account liberalization the causality runs from South African Rand to gold price volatility but the causality runs the other way...

We examine the relationship between the South African Rand and the gold price volatility using monthly data for the period 1979–2010. Our main finding is that prior to capital account liberalization the causality runs from the South African Rand to the gold price volatility but the causality...