Over the past years, governments have made substantial progress in tobacco control through higher taxes, advertising bans, and public smoking restrictions. Yet, in many advanced economies, smoking rates have stopped falling despite these strong measures. This stagnation suggests that traditional...

Since U.S. bank capital holdings began rising almost concurrently with the monetary policy change after 2008, we examine the role of capital requirements for monetary policy regimes. While standard models predict that equilibrium determination and responses to aggregate shocks are fundamentally...

Many developing country governments would like to attract investment and create jobs in manufacturing and high-tech industries. Heavy and unpredictable laws and regulations, frequent demands for bribes, high taxes, poor-quality roads, slow and inefficient ports, and unreliable power, however,...

Amidst the escalating geopolitical fragmentation of the global financial system, divergent stablecoin architectures are emerging. This study employs Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and introduces a formalized 'Geopolitical Stablecoin' (GPSC) model to conduct a systematic comparison of...

Ceremonies are central to social life, yet the pressure to conform to community spending norms traps households in a collectively suboptimal equilibrium, imposing severe financial burdens. Using nationally and regionally representative longitudinal data from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, we...

This study examines whether size-contingent employment regulations are associated with distortions in firm size distribution and whether such patterns are more consistent with productivity-based selection or with broader constraints on firm scaling. Using 2024 census data covering 86,758 formal...

Despite having developed a comprehensive and highly-rated regulatory policy system (so-called 'better regulation'), involving consultation, impact assessments, evaluation, inter-institutional commitment and independent oversight, the European Union continues to face criticism for the volume,...

The Building Regulatory Capacity Assessment (BRCA) is a methodology to help countries, and cities assess their building and land use regulatory framework and identify opportunities for priority reforms and improvements. This is a pressing issue, as in many countries, rapid urbanization is...

Do firms uniformly oppose regulations that increase production costs, or might industry leaders strategically support stricter standards as a competitive tool? We identify a specific mechanism through which large firms strategically support regulations to enhance their competitive position....

We study how sustainability disclosure regulation affects mutual fund flows and portfolio choices, accounting for investor heterogeneity. Guided by a model of ESG investing under uncertainty, we exploit the introduction of the European Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) as a...

This study reviews the literature on the impacts of Certificate-of-Need (CON) laws, which require the approval of states' health planning agencies for health care providers to engage in regulated actions such as opening or expanding facilities or purchasing equipment. Economic theory suggests...

Government by regulation structures how constitutional democracies normally operate. Legislatures and executive agencies enact formal rules that govern conduct, embodying the ideal of government by laws rather than by individuals. Yet regulators also govern through threats of regulation. When...

Political debates, campaigns, and advertising increasingly take place on online platforms. However, research on election communication has been significantly hampered as formerly accessible data sources have been withdrawn or commercialised. With the implementation of the EU Digital Services Act...

Global agencies such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) play a central role in internet governance, developing the rules, guidelines, and procedures that shape both the...

Decentralised Finance (DeFi) emerged in 2021 as a fast-growing crypto segment, attracting policymakers' attention due to its innovative approach of delivering financial services without relying on centralised intermediaries. This paper assesses DeFi governance arrangements for regulating and...

The promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in residential energy is consumer empowerment, yet without appropriate governance the emerging reality may be its opposite. As households become data producers, behavioural subjects, and operational assets within intelligent electricity networks, a...

Consumer consent regulation is the cornerstone of modern data privacy regulation such as the European GDPR and the Californian CCPA. By ensuring that consumers can reject any harmful data collection, the regulation seems an effective tool for protecting consumers against price discrimination. By...

This paper studies the effectiveness of risk management, one of the two channels identified by the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS, 2024) as those through which the financial system contributes to physical risk adaptation in the European Union (EU). We assess the efficacy of...

We illustrate the coordination problem in the provision of distinctive architectural design that arises from design externalities within a quantitative model. To quantify the model, we conduct a quantitative review of a growing literature concerned with the costs and benefits of distinctive...

The European Union Emissions Trading System is set to substantially increase the effective carbon price faced by airlines. To quantify the impact of this carbon regulation on the European airline industry, we estimate a two-stage model of airline competition with endogenous route entry, flight...

This paper investigates the relationship between institutional and regulatory quality, and high-tech sector investment. Using data from 25 European Union (EU) countries from 2004 to 2019 (extended to 2023 for artificial intelligence-specific analyses), the study examines how institutional...

In this article, we analyse the controversies leading up to and following Meta's introduction of the infamous "pay or okay model" for Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) region. In particular, we focus on the central role of the Norwegian data...

This study investigates the role of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance in reshaping the relationship between financial constraints and green innovation among Chinese listed firms from 2010 to 2023. We examine the double-edged sword hypothesis that financial constraints...

Over the past decades, a growing body of research has examined the structural and behavioral barriers that hinder firms from adopting cost-effective technologies to improve energy efficiency. In this paper, we draw on firm-level data from the EIB Investment Survey combined with energy efficiency...

The non-CO2 aviation emissions (mainly contrails) can, in total, be up to twice as damaging for climate as the CO2 emissions associated to the use of kerosene. As the warming effect of the non-CO2 emissions depends strongly on metereological conditions, it is difficult to attribute the non-CO2...

This thesis operationalises the European Health Data Space (EHDS) notion of a Secure Processing Environment (SPE) by translating technology-neutral regulatory obligations into implementable and testable platform requirements. Following a Design Science Research approach, it introduces a...

I study how third-party firms respond when a platform owner enters its own marketplace, analyzing Apple's entries into App Store submarkets from 2016-2021. Using text embeddings to define markets and a staggered difference-in-differences design, I find that Apple's entry deters new competitors...

Higher temperatures can increase substance abuse and exacerbate its physiological effects on the human body, raising the risk of violent behavior. Using administrative crime records and daily temperatures in the United States between 1991 and 2023, we show that two public policies regulating...

Green fintech merges sustainable finance with data-intensive innovation, but national translations of EU rules can create regulatory risk. This study examines how such risk manifests in Central Europe and which policy tools mitigate it. We develop a three-dimension framework-regulatory clarity...

At the request of the Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan (RMA), the Monetary and Capital Markets Department (MCM) conducted a mission to review and strengthen Bhutan’s fintech regulatory sandbox (RS) framework. The mission was held from August 25 to September 2, 2025, in Thimphu, Bhutan and...

This report summarizes the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) technical assistance mission to the Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan (RMA), focused on reviewing and strengthening the fintech regulatory sandbox (RS) framework. The mission, conducted from August 25 to September 2, 2025, assessed...

The paper synthesizes global experiences and key lessons in the regulation and supervision of cyber risk in the financial sector. It draws on the IMF’s financial stability surveillance and technical assistance work. It underscores the increasing frequency and complexity of cyber threats. These...