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TAMERS OF FINANCE: REGULATORS AND THE POLITICS OF MACROPRUDENTIAL POLICY

The 2008 global financial crisis was a rude awakening for financial regulators. In its wake, a novel approach called macroprudential policy became an important pillar of financial regulation. But in the years after the crisis, the stringency of macroprudential policy outputs vary across countries, across specific financial sectors, and across time, a worrying reality given that uneven regulation across borders and sectors was one of the exacerbating factors of the 2008 crisis. What explains this cross-country, cross-sectoral and cross-temporal variations in macroprudential policy? This dissertation argues that when the political salience of financial regulation is high, politicians are more likely to intervene in regulatory affairs to impose their policy preferences. But in times when salience is low, it is the policy orientation of the regulators – the “tamers of finance” – that primarily shape the stringency of macroprudential policy. In institutional settings with multiple financial regulators who hold conflicting policy orientations, this bureaucratic tension is likely to increase policy stringency. This theoretical framework is tested through an in-depth comparative historical analysis of the banking and asset management sectors in the United States and Japan. In the US banking sector, regulators to impose highly stringent macroprudential policies in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, but they began to loosen these policies at the margins from 2017. The US asset management sector, on the other hand, was characterized by policies of moderate stringency in the wake of the crisis, and again after 2014. In the Japanese banking case, the crucial financial crisis for determining macroprudential policy outcomes came not in 2008 but in the late 1990s, when the government was compelled to contain a banking crisis and implemented highly stringent policies. After 2008, therefore, Japanese regulators could afford to implement policies of only moderate stringency. Finally, the Japanese asset management sector remains untouched by macroprudential policy because both politicians and regulators gradually deregulated and liberalized to this sector, which historically struggled to grow, and have not felt the need to enact macroprudential policies. In all, this analysis broadly confirms the theoretical framework set forth in this dissertation. / Political Science

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:TEMPLE/oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/8605
Date January 2023
CreatorsJames, Walter
ContributorsFioretos, Karl Orfeo, 1966-, Soifer, Hillel David, Deeg, Richard, 1961-, Moschella, Manuela
PublisherTemple University. Libraries
Source SetsTemple University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis/Dissertation, Text
Format269 pages
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Relationhttp://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/8569, Theses and Dissertations

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