Regulatory novelty after financial crises: Evidence from international banking and securities standards, 1975–2016

Abstract

Financial crises are often presented as triggers for important innovations in international regulation of financial markets, but existing evidence for this claim primarily derive from the analyses of individual initiatives, assessed against noncomparable benchmarks. In order to provide systematic evidence of financial crises' impact on international financial regulatory change, this paper develops a novel text-as-data approach to measure regulatory novelty. We use this approach to analyze the full population of international banking and securities standards between 1975 and 2016. Contrary to theoretical expectations, our empirical findings indicate rules designed by international banking and securities regulators following financial crises are on average as likely to build on existing international regulations as those designed before a crisis. We also find that international banking rules published after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis are an important exception.

Does politics drive conflict in central banks’ committees? Lifting the veil on the European Central Bank consensus

“… 6 Cosine similarity has been used, for example, to compare similarity among legislations (Garrett and Jansa, 2015), parliamentary speeches (Diodati et al., 2018), international financial regulation (Pagliari and Wilf, 2018) and parties’ manifestos (Menini et al., 2017). …”