Regulation

Congress is considering eliminating the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the independent federal agency that “audits the auditors.” Karthik Ramanna and Nemit Shroff write...

The following is an excerpt from Angela Zhang's recent book, High Wire, out at Oxford University Press. Please join the Stigler Center on April 3 at 6:30-7:30 pm CT for a conversation with Zhang, where she'll discuss High Wire with Financial Times' China Technology Correspondent Eleanor Olcott. You can register for the livestream of the event here.

State occupational-licensing requirements have ballooned over the past decades to cover seemingly nonsensical professions, raising barriers to entry and costs for consumers. Ray Ball, S.P. Kothari, and Andrew Sutherland argue that the current deregulatory movement in the United States should target these regulations next.

In recent research, Jennifer Arlen and Lewis A. Kornhauser develop a new model to understand how countries should approach and balance corporate and individual...

Utsav Gandhi relates recent developments in the American government’s ban on TikTok and shows how the case maps over broader debates about conflicts between...

In new research, William Christopher Gerken, Steven Irlbeck, Marcus Painter and Guangli Zhang track the movements of Securities and Exchange Commission-associated smartphone devices to shed light on the SEC’s investigatory process and understand how office visits from its staff alter firm behavior and outcomes.

This research note employs the quantitative approach developed by Francesco Trebbi, Miao Ben Zhang, and Michael Simkovic (2023) to provide a descriptive overview of the main differences in costs of regulatory compliance across U.S. states for the year 2014 and over the period 2002-2014. These descriptive stylized facts can be useful in grounding extant discussion on regulatory compliance burden across different U.S. regions and over time and presents both unconditional results and results controlling for state industry composition.

New research from SP Kothari, Hamid Mehran and Zirui Song argues that share buybacks - rather than traditional dividends - may actually be safer for financial stability since they offer banks more flexibility and don't signal distress when reduced. The authors show that while dividends create pressure for consistent payments and industry-wide ripple effects when cut, buybacks allow banks to adjust their capital distribution to the present circumstances.

In this second installment of a two-part series, David Dubrow and Kent Hiteshew propose reforms to improve disclosure standards in the municipal bond market, exploring both legislative and regulatory approaches. They outline eight key guidelines for enhancing transparency and consistency in municipal offering statements, aiming to bring these disclosures into the modern era and better protect investors.

Two municipal market veterans, David Dubrow and Kent Hiteshew, delve into the history and current state of disclosure practices in the municipal bond market, highlighting the flaws in the current system. In a follow up, the authors will explore potential paths to reform and key components of a uniform standard of disclosure for municipal securities.