This paper explores the link between the political influence of the financial industry and financial regulation in the run-up to the global financial crisis. We construct a detailed dataset documenting the politically targeted activities of the financial industry from 1999 to 2006. The analysis shows that lobbying expenditures by the financial industry were directly linked to the position legislators took on the key bills. Network connections of lobbyists and the financial industry with the legislators were also associated with increased odds of the legislator’s position being in favor of lax regulation. These findings support the view that financial regulation is prone to be influenced by the financial industry.
This paper studies the transmission of monetary shocks to lending rates in a large sample of advanced, emerging, and low-income countries. Transmission is measured by the impulse response of bank lending rates to monetary policy shocks. Long-run restrictions are used to identify such shocks. Using a heterogeneous structural panel VAR, we find that there is wide variation in the response of bank lending rates to a monetary policy innovation across countries. Monetary policy shocks are more likely to affect bank lending rates in the theoretically expected direction in countries that have better institutional frameworks, more developed financial structures, and less concentrated banking systems. Low-income countries score poorly along all of these dimensions, and we find that such countries indeed exhibit much weaker transmission of monetary policy shocks to bank lending rates than do advanced and emerging economies.
How is economic policy made? In this paper we study a key determinant of the answer to the question: lobbying by firms. Estimating a binary choice model of firm behavior, we find significant evidence for the idea that barriers to entry induce persistence in lobbying. The existence of these costs is further confirmed in studying how firms responded to a particular policy change: the expiration of legislation relating to the H-1B visa. Due to its influence on firm behavior, we argue that this persistence fundamentally changes the environment in which legislation is made.
Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is scarce, limited to few reforms and countries and for few years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital, public, and banking sectors, product and labor markets, agriculture, and trade for 150 countries over the period 1960?2004. Democracy has a positive and significant impact on the adoption of economic reforms but there is no evidence that economic reforms foster democracy. Our results are robust to the inclusion of a large variety of controls and estimation strategies.
This paper surveys the evidence on the effectiveness of monetary transmission in developing countries. We summarize the arguments for expecting the bank lending channel to be the dominant means of monetary transmission in such countries, and present a simple model that suggests why this channel may be both weak and unreliable under the conditions that usually characterize those economies. Next, we review the empirical methodologies that have been employed in the recent literature to assess monetary policy effectiveness, both in developing countries as well as in industrial and emerging economies, essentially based on vector autoregressions (VARs). It is very hard to come away from this review of the evidence with much confidence in the strength of monetary transmission in developing countries. We distinguish between the "facts on the ground" and "methodological deficiencies" interpretations of the absence of evidence for strong monetary transmission. We suspect, however, that "facts on the ground" are indeed an important part of the story. The fact that a wide range of empirical approaches have failed to yield evidence of effective monetary transmission in developing countries, and that the strongest evidence for effective monetary transmission has arisen for relatively prosperous and more institutionally developed countries such as some central and Eastern European transition economies (at least in the later stages of their transition) and Tunisia, makes us doubt whether methodological shortcomings are the whole story. If this conjecture is correct, the stabilization challenge in developing countries is acute indeed, and identifying the means of enhancing the effectiveness of monetary policy in such countries is an important challenge.
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