Financial Regulations: Intermediation, Stability and Productivity (I)
16-17 January 2017, National University of Singapore Business School, Singapore

The financial sector’s fundamental economic and social function is to efficiently allocate capital and distribute risk. Regulations inevitably affect the attainment of these goals.

Since the Great Financial Crisis, most countries’ financial sectors face re-regulations. Implementation, however, varies by country. There is also considerable country-level variation in financial sector market structure, financial institution characteristics, etc. This is economically important as different types of financial institutions have different target clients, capabilities, funding sources, risk exposure and regulatory constraints. Further, similar regulations might have very different economic consequences in countries with different legacy financial market structures and financial institutions.

The Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER) is considering a series of specialty conferences around the theme of “Financial Regulation, Financial Intermediation, and Economic Performance.” In this first call, – co-sponsored with the European Central Bank (ECB), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the Asian Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank Institute and the National University of Singapore Business School (NUS-BIZ) – we are soliciting both theoretical and empirical papers on the following topics:

• Historical, theoretical, and empirical investigation into the political economy forces that drive financial regulation.
• Location-specific studies about how regulatory changes affect firm-level financial institutions’ behaviour, including lending to SMEs or start-ups, households and trade finance, infrastructure financing, as well as credit growth, credit allocation, financial inclusion and risk taking more generally. Also, how do factors such as size, liquidity, capital adequacy, and risk exposure affect different types of lending?
• Judicial efficiency is considered important in Western economies, but Asians have been characterized as preferring to avoid going to court if at all possible. Is judicial efficiency a “sideshow” in some parts of Asia? Generally, how is regulation administered and enforced in different countries and what is the impact?
• Have recent regulatory changes affected institutions profitability, financial innovation, competition in banking and in the financial sector in general? Does recent regulation improve the allocative efficiency of the financial sector?
• How do all of the above affect the overall economy’s productivity performance? Have regulatory changes affected the trade-off between growth and stability?
• How do they affect international capital flows into, out of, and between Asian economies? What is the effect of cross-border regulatory arbitrage on firms’ financing patterns and on affected regions’ financial stability and productivity growth?