The conventional wisdom is that this country’s privately owned critical infrastructure — banks, telecommunications networks, the power grid, and so on — is vulnerable to catastrophic cyber-attacks. The existing academic literature does not adequately grapple with this problem, however,...

This paper challenges the idea that globalization should be viewed as a damaging western ideology. Rather than being an expression of US imperialism, the benign process of globalization is threatened by the unwillingess of the US to maintain its Pax, whilst simultaneously attempting to legislate...

The Basel Accord has often been regarded as one of the most successful forms of international regulation due to the high level of compliance from various actors despite the lack of direct repercussions. International financial regulation as a form of soft law is able to exert a power over actors...

High-frequency trading, dark pools, front-running, phantom orders, short selling — the way securities are traded ranks high among today's regulatory challenges. It has become commonplace, both in financial and in academic circles, to call for the government to intervene and impose order. From...

The post-9/11 intensified attention to the financing of terrorism has often focused on the interaction with the activities of charities. Their vulnerabilities have been most underlined by the Financial Action Task Force. The resultant qualitative prominence given to anti-terrorism financing...

Financial regulation should be countercyclical, strengthening during speculative booms to contain excessive leverage and loosening following crises so as to not limit credit extension in hard times. And yet, financial regulation in fact tends to be procyclical, strengthening following crises and...

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, three “regulatory cycles” can be identified in Italy. In the underlying model, each financial crisis gives rise to regulatory changes, which are circumvented in due time by financial innovation, that can then contribute to the outbreak of a new financial...

The IRS recently announced that its mandatory registration regime for paid tax return preparers, struck down in the Loving decision, would henceforth be offered as a voluntary program. But the authors of this program appear to have forgotten that the US system is perfectly global in reach,...

This paper analyses economic freedom for a sample of 21 OECD countries over the past 170 years on the basis of a new thoroughly revised Historical Index of Economic Liberty (HIEL). Long-term gains in economic freedom reached two-thirds of its potential maximum. The expansion of economic freedom...