Do politicians tend to follow a strategy of ambiguity in their policy positions or a strategy of reputational development to reduce uncertainty about where they stand? Ambiguity could allow a legislator to avoid alienating constituents and to play rival interests off against each other to...

This paper develops a positive theory of how competition among political pressure groups shapes the organization of Congress and empirically investigates how such competition in financial services affects the distribution of political action committee (PAC) contributions to legislators.

This paper investigates the relationship between politics and the banking and financial system and explores the implications of this interdependence for understanding regulations and their reforms. Five complementary positive political economy theories are outlined and applied to understand the...

This paper provides a politive political economy analysis of the most important revision of the U.S. supervision and regulation sustem during the last two decades, the 1991 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Imporovement Act (FDICIA). We analyze the impact of private interest groups as well...

An enormous effort has gone into banking and financial regulatory reform following the recent financial crisis. The paper is an attempt to describe some key open questions about the relation among stability, growth, and regulatory reform and then raise some concerns about overemphasis on some...