Financial systems are crucial to the allocation of resources in a modern economy. They channel household savings to the corporate sector and allocate investment funds among firms; they allow intertemporal smoothing of consumption by households and expenditures by firms; and they enable households and firms to share risks. These functions are common to the financial systems of most developed economies. Yet the form of these financial systems varies widely. In the United States and the United Kingdom competitive markets dominate the financial landscape, whereas in France, Germany, and Japan banks have traditionally played the most important role. Why do different countries have such different financial systems? Is one system better than all the others? Do different systems merely represent alternative ways of satisfying similar needs? Is the current trend toward market-based systems desirable? Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale argue that the view that market-based systems are best is simplistic. A more nuanced approach is necessary. For example, financial markets may be bad for risk sharing; competition in banking may be inefficient; financial crises can be good as well as bad; and separation of ownership and control can be optimal. Financial institutions are not simply veils, disguising the allocation mechanism without affecting it, but are crucial to overcoming market imperfections. An optimal financial system relies on both financial markets and financial intermediaries.

比较金融系统 = Comparing financial systems

THE PRESS AND FOREIGN POLICY' IT IS a defect of some of the studies of the diplomatic background of the Great War that they tend to ignore the influence on pre-war diplomacy of public opinion in general and of the press in particular. Based primarily on official documents such studies unconsciously tend to overemphasize the parts played by the leaders with whose activities the documents are so largely concerned and to neglect some of the less obvious forces that affected the course of events. The influence of the press, it is true, can never be measured accurately. \"No diviniiig rod can locate it,\" says Miss Salmon, \"no plummet sound its depth, no instrument of precision measure it, no astronomer compute its orbit.\"2 And yet that influence in pre-war Europe was very real and very considerable. Professor Fay goes so far as to list \"the poisoning of public opinion by the newspaper press in all the great countries\"3 as one of the chief underlying causes of the war. If the influence of the press cannot be exactly determined, however, it can at least be roughly estimated; and even where no attempt is made to estimate influence, a kniowledge of newspaper views on questions of foreign policy is of assistance in clarifying the atmosphere out of which the Great WYar came.

The Press and Foreign Policy

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

Comparing financial systems.

The purpose of this course is to acquaint students with the wide variety of regulatory processes, policies, and institutions in this country. Furthermore, students will develop a sophisticated and rigorous understanding of selected elements of regulatory politics, processes, and policies involving a regulatory agency of the U.S. government. To accomplish this, a variety of materials will be presented. These will involve reading, discussion and integration of the concepts of regulation, as well as understanding the processes by which regulatory policy is developed and implemented. Also, the impacts or results of such regulatory policies will be treated. In addition, students will gain a good deal of experience and develop techniques for conducting a diverse set of research and writing skills.

The politics of regulation

The global financial crisis that erupted in the summer of 2007 has made the reform of international prudential financial regulation one of the top priorities of global public policy. Past scholarship has usefully explained the creation and strengthening of international financial standards with reference to three policy arenas: inter-state, domestic, and transnational. Despite the accomplishments of this specialist literature, the recent crisis has revealed a number of limitations in the ways scholars have understood inter-state power relations, the influence of domestic politics, and the significance of transnational actors within international financial regulatory politics. Taken together, developments in each of these three arenas suggest that researchers may also need to be prepared to shift from explaining the strengthening of official international standards to analyzing their weakening in the post-crisis world. The latter task will require scholars to devote more analytical attention to a wider set of international regulatory outcomes, including “informal regulatory convergence”, “regulatory fragmentation”, and especially “cooperative regulatory decentralization”.

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The End of an Era in International Financial Regulation? A Postcrisis Research Agenda

The power of financial industry groups is a subject of widespread academic and public debate. Existing international political economy (IPE) research has highlighted how different resources, institutions and structural features allow financial industry groups to influence financial regulatory policymaking. In so doing, however, this literature routinely tends to neglect the wider array of interest groups beyond the particular financial industry groups being regulated. Actor plurality is usually assumed to be low or inconsequential. Such an assumption obscures the important role that actor plurality may play in the policymaking process. We present new quantitative and qualitative evidence demonstrating how global financial regulatory politics is more plural than most existing depictions would suggest. Actor plurality can have significant effects in ‘leveraging’ the influence of financial industry groups, which are often able to tie in their interests with those of other private sector groups affect...

/pdf/leveraged-interests-financial-industry-power-and-the-role-of-1r89q4ymd9.pdf

Leveraged interests: Financial industry power and the role of private sector coalitions

1. Introduction - Global Finance in Crisis: The Politics of International Regulatory Change Eric Helleiner and Stefano Pagliari Part 1: Issues and Structures 2. Regulatory Reactions to the Global Credit Crisis: Analysing a Policy Community under Stress Eleni Tsingou 3. The Politics of Accounting Regulation: Responses to the Subprime Crisis Andreas Nolke 4. Risk Models and Transnational Governance in the Global Financial Crisis: The Cases of Basel II and Credit Rating Agencies Tony Porter 5. The End of Self-Regulation? Hedge Funds and Derivatives in Global Financial Governance Eric Helleiner and Stefano Pagliari Part 2: Countries and Regions 6. Uncertain Leadership: The U.S. Regulatory Response to the Global Financial Crisis David Andrew Singer 7. Is a European Approach to Financial Regulation Emerging from the Crisis? Elliot Posner 8. Varieties of Global Financial Governance? British and German Approaches to Financial Market Regulation Hubert Zimmermann 9. Mission Accomplished, or a Sisyphean Task? Japan's Regulatory Responses to the Global Financial Crisis Saori N. Katada 10. Chinese Attitudes towards Global Financial Regulatory Cooperation: Revisionist or Status Quo? Andrew Walter 11. Whither International Financial Regulation? Hubert Zimmermann

Global finance in crisis: the politics of international regulatory change

The division of responsibilities in the regulation and supervision of financial markets between ‘public’ regulatory agencies and ‘private’ market actors is not fixed; it has radically changed across time. This paper argues that the financial crisis of 2007–2009 has triggered the latest turn in the ‘public–private’ divide in the regulation of finance. Focusing in particular on the extensive reforms that have been introduced in the regulation of over-the-counter derivatives, credit rating agencies and hedge funds in Europe and internationally, this paper argues that the response to the financial crisis has brought to a halt the reliance on self-regulation and market discipline as primary regulatory mechanisms that had characterised the approach of regulators prior to the crisis. However, while public regulatory agencies have consolidated in their hands the authority to regulate and oversee markets previously left outside their regulatory oversight, the content and the purpose of their regulatory intervention continue to present significant element of continuity with the pre-crisis regulatory model.

/pdf/who-governs-finance-the-shifting-public-private-divide-in-1392g86hyn.pdf

Who Governs Finance?: The Shifting Public–Private Divide in the Regulation of Derivatives, Rating Agencies and Hedge Funds

Existing literature has offered a variety of claims regarding why financial regulatory politics features a relative dominance of the regulated financial industry. In this article we explore the broader interest group environment in which financial industry advocacy operates. Using new data on interest group participation in financial regulatory consultations, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of the ecology of interest groups that populate financial regulatory policymaking. Through a new measure of ‘mobilized dissent’ we find evidence that the level of interest group pluralism in financial regulatory policymaking is constrained by the limited mobilization of voices outside of the business community. We analyze how mobilized dissent toward the regulated financial industry changes in response to different institutional environments. While technical complexity, institutional context, and the global financial crisis are found to impact the level of mobilized dissent, the impact of these environmental conditions varies across different groups. This analysis reveals not only that organized opposition to the financial industry is relatively weak but also that it is relatively disjointed.

/pdf/the-interest-ecology-of-financial-regulation-interest-group-575vuxeycb.pdf

Stefano Pagliari

Papers

The End of an Era in International Financial Regulation? A Postcrisis Research Agenda

Leveraged interests: Financial industry power and the role of private sector coalitions

Global finance in crisis: the politics of international regulatory change

Who Governs Finance?: The Shifting Public–Private Divide in the Regulation of Derivatives, Rating Agencies and Hedge Funds

The Interest Ecology of Financial Regulation: Interest Group Plurality in the Design of Financial Regulatory Policies