From June 2011, the BIS credit derivatives statistics provide more granular information on the types of risks transferred through credit default swaps by different groups of counterparties. The new data suggest that reporting dealers have used some hard-tovalue credit derivatives to transfer...

This article describes the Basel II capital rules for securitization exposures, explaining the considerations that influenced regulators' decisions, the approaches for calculating capital and how banks will apply them, the financial engineering that underlies the different approaches and the...

As the 2008 financial crisis spread globally, it became widely apparent that an essential ingredient to preventing future systemic crises was reform of the regulation of financial markets. Two ambitious initiatives for regulatory reform are the European Union's European System of Financial...

The design of wholesale electricity markets in the transition towards liberalization presents significant differences from country to country. Some spot markets have imposed the concentration of transactions to ensure market liquidity. Other markets are based on bilateral trading. The debate...

From March 3 to March 5, 2010, the German Association for Law and Society and the University of Bremen hosted a Conference on "Transnationalism in Law, State and Society". Part of this conference was a panel on transnational financial markets regulation. The aim of this panel was to ask some...

We show that previous results suggesting that government ownership of banks is associated with lower long run growth rates are not robust to adding more 'fundamental' determinants of economic growth. We also present new cross-country evidence for 1995-2007 which suggests that, if anything,...

We present a simple model of systemic risk and show how each financial institution’s contribution to systemic risk can be measured and priced. An institution’s contribution, denoted systemic expected shortfall (SES), is its propensity to be undercapitalized when the system as a whole is...

This paper examines poverty in the United States from 1960 through 2005. We investigate how poverty rates and poverty gaps have changed over time, explore how these trends differ across family types, contrast these trends for several different income and consumption measures of poverty, and...

For many decades the word “regulation” has been a bogeyman concept evoking images of unproductive and wasteful government bureaucracy. While this image has been a popular rallying cry for politicians over the years, every interest group — with the exception of libertarians — has actively...

Along with the developments in financial markets across the globe, there has been a growing perception that volatility in asset returns have gone up. Volatility sure has gone up, but how much of it is backed by information arrivals and how much by other factors is a matter of debate. The...