Who is watching the finance industry? There have been multiple waves of thought about whether the ministry of finance, the central bank, a specialized regulator or some combination of these should have supervisory authority. These waves have been associated with the convergence of actual practices. How much and through what channels did internationally promoted ideas about supervisory ‘best practice’ influence institutional design choices?
In (open access) “The diffusion of financial supervisory governance ideas“, Christopher Gandrud (Hertie School of Governance) uses a new dataset of 83 countries and jurisdictions between the 1980s and 2007 to examine the diffusion of supervisory ideas. With this data, Gandrud employ Cox Proportional Hazard and Competing Risks Event History Analyses to evaluate the possible causal roles best practice policy ideas might have played. The paper finds and shows that banking crises and certain peer groups can encourage policy convergence on heavily promoted ideas, like the UK FSA model of financial supervision.
