1,721,276 research outputs found
Uscire dalla decrescita: il ruolo del capitale civile
No full textFrutto di un convegno sul ruolo che le Banche Popolari e Cooperative continuano ad avere insieme ai territori e alle loro imprese innovative sotto il profilo della competitività e della presenza anche in nuovi mercati esteri, il volume declina le intersezioni tra istituzioni, società ed economia, evidenziando le particolarità che il nostro Paese vive
Bankers, Bureaucrats, and Central Bank Politics: The Myth of Neutrality
No full textMost studies of the political economy of money focus on the laws protecting central banks from government interference; this book turns to the overlooked people who actually make monetary policy decisions. Using formal theory and statistical evidence from dozens of central banks across the developed and developing worlds, this book shows that monetary policy agents are not all the same. Molded by specific professional and sectoral backgrounds and driven by career concerns, central bankers with different career trajectories choose predictably different monetary policies
Migration and Illegal Finance
No full textDeals with the relationship between migratory flows and financial flows from the viewpoint of economic analysis. Points out the differences between migrants and host populations as this relates to the demand for banking and financial services, for instance the importance to migrants of remittances to their home countries. Analyses the similarities and differences between money laundering and money dirtying (ie financing terrorism) and between formal and informal banking systems and the need for concealment. Focuses on the Italian case, exploring whether there is a relationship between the existence of migration and the risk of terrorist financing. Concludes that empirical aggregate analysis cannot support the existence of a link between intensification of migration flow and the risk of financing Islamic terrorism
Independence, conservatism, and beyond: monetary policy, central bank governance and central banker preferences (1981–2021)
No full textThe aim of the paper is to offer a theoretical setting to shed light on how two factors – central bank design and central banker preferences – assumed progressively a crucial role in the evolution of monetary policy economics in the last four decades. After the seminal contributes of Sargent and Wallace (1981) and Barro and Gordon (1983) on central bank independence (CBI), and Rogoff (1985) on central banker conservatism (CBC), Eijffinger and Hoeberichts (1988) distinguished the two concepts and their relevance in shaping the monetary policy choices. Since then, CBI and CBC became the founding pillars of a growing strand of literature, where it has been recognized that on the one side the central bankers’ preferences, as well as their drivers, can be heterogeneous, while on the other side the analysis must be more granular, given that monetary policy decisions are made by committees. Moreover, it is shown how in this literature the political economy methodology has been enriched using insights from behavioural economics
Financial Supervision Architectures: Economics, Politics, Institutions and Law
No full textThe objective of this paper was to analyze the tendency to consolidate the financial supervision architecture so as to determine its possible causes. The approach was to consider the supervisory framework with one or more authorities as a dependent latent variable determined by the lawmaker, which can be influenced in turn by the institutional and economic characteristics of his own country. Looking for common determinants in the decision each country takes in these years to maintain or reform its supervisory architecture, we model the lawmakers' decisions with ordered probit and logit functions with a dataset for 68 countries. The empirical analysis highlighted that the level of financial supervision consolidation seems to depend on the institutional factor (represented by the central bank role), the financial factor, the political factor and the legal factor, while the effect of the economic and geographical factors seems negligible
Offshore Financial Centres: the Political Economy of Regulation
No full textThis paper claims that the regulation profile of the Offshore Financial
Centres (OFCs) with respect to the international standards defined to prevent
potentially harmful phenomena—such as aggressive taxation, financial instability,
money laundering and terrorism finance—depends on their specific structural features.
In the designing of the regulatory framework the OFCs policymakers define
the optimal degree of compliance maximizing a political cost benefit function. A
simple model shows that the policymaker convenience to establish an OFC jurisdiction
can depend on peculiar country endowments, consistently with a pathdependency
approach. The model is empirically tested using a 222 countries’
sample, using different classifications of OFCs. On the one hand we find that the
probability to be an OFC is greater with higher political stability, lower crime level,
lower voice in international organizations, and if the country is characterized by a
Common Law juridical system. Furthermore a low resource endowment seems to
have a slightly influence on the choices to be an OFC. On the other hand it seems
not to be crucial to use English as official language, to be a former colony, and also
the geographical position it is not fundamental. The results are used for an overall
assessment of the adequacy of the international policy aimed to fill the regulation
gap, raising doubts on the persistency of the name and shame approac
Could Sticks Become Carrots? Money Laundering, Black Lists and Offshore Centres
No full textWe develop the assumption that lax financial regulation may be a strategic dependent variable for national policymakers seeking to maximize the net benefits produced by any public policy choice. Therefore, given the structural features and endowments of their own countries, policymakers may it find profitable to adopt financial regulations that attract capital of illicit origin (money laundering services) or destination (terrorism finance services), therefore choosing to be a NCCT jurisdiction.
From a methodological point of view, we follow the classic intuitions of the new political economy, basing our work on three hypotheses: 1) the definition of regulatory policy is not independent, as in the conventional economics, but endogenous; 2) policy is not determined by maximizing a social welfare function but by taking into account the political cost-benefit payoff ; and 3) policymaker maximization is constrained and influenced by the structural framework, economic as well as institutional. We are also indebted to a strand of literature, usually associated with the ‘law and economics’ movement, which we deem to be strictly, though indirectly, related to the subject matter of our research, i.e. the literature on the competition in regulation. More specifically, we take the approach developed by authors that have tackled the issue in the “transaction cost economics” tradition and apply it in a novel area.
The paper proceeds as follows. The second section provides a simple model to describe, through the policymaker payoff maximization, the relationships between specific country features and endowments, on the one hand, and lax financial regulations, on the other hand. Given that in the real world relatively lax regulation means a non-cooperative attitude in the international fight against money laundering, in the third section we empirically test the above theoretical relationship in the case of the NCCT jurisdictions and offshore centres. The policy consequences are discussed in the conclusive fourth section
Divide et Impera: Financial Supervision Unification and Central Bank Fragmentation Effec
No full textThis paper analyses how the central bank role can influence the unification process of the overall financial supervision architecture. We claim that the policymaker’s choices can be viewed as a sequential process in which the institutional status quo matters: The degree of unification in supervision is decided based on the position of the central bank. If the central bank involvement in supervision and its reputation are high, the unification level is likely to be low, and vice versa. The central bank fragmentation effect can be explained through three possible channels: the moral hazard effect, the bureaucracy effect, the reputation endowment effect. The empirical analysis - performed with ordered logit and probit functions with a dataset of 89 countries – confirmed the robustness of the central bank fragmentation effect
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