Politics, Corporations, and the Common Good
On October 20, 2023, the third edition of our CEPR Conference Series on the Political Economy of Finance took place in the beautiful Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam. This edition gathered a…
Governor Appointments and Central Bank Independence
Since the late 1980s, many countries have reformed the legal frameworks governing central banks to protect these institutions from undue political influence and safeguard price (and financial) stability (Grilli et…
Democracy as a Fundamental Determinant of Cross-Border Merger Activity
Does democracy shape international merger activity? If so, how? The short answer is yes because democratic institutions are conducive to higher-quality corporate governance. In a new paper, we examine 104,425…
Politics and the Finance-Growth Nexus
2022 started pretty well with the acceptance (on January 2!) of my paper “Banks, Political Capital, and Growth” at the Review of Corporate Finance Studies. In this post, I’d like…
Political Economy in Finance
This post reports on recent work presented at the first edition of the CEPR Conference Series on the Political Economy of Finance, which focused on the politics of regulation and…
Voting Rights and Financial Systems: Evidence from Two Centuries of Suffrage Reforms
Extending voting rights to broader segments of the population considerably affects the way countries finance their economies. This is the key finding of our new research recently published in the…
Lobbying on Regulatory Enforcement Actions
A major task of financial economics and political science is to explain the raison d’être, but also the consequences, of the influence of the banking industry on the government. When…
Lobbying and the Efficiency of Bank Sales
Bank lobbying can distort regulatory decisions by introducing private incentives into the decision-making process. Regulators are criticised for serving both their own interests, and those of the banks they regulate,…
Lobbying on the Sale of Failed Banks
The aftermath of the financial crisis revealed failures and gaps in regulatory actions. In particular, regulators have been criticized for serving special interests—not only of the banks they regulate but…
The Study of Political Institutions at the Centre of Financial Economics
In a recent survey of the literature on the political economy of finance (available here), we argue that understanding the evolution and functioning of financial systems cannot be fully appreciated…