Bank Regulation: Will Regulators Catch Up with the Market?

Legislation on financial services modernization has taken on special urgency since the banking industry is transforming itself through mergers stretching across financial services and across countries. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), the new chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has made bank regulatory reform his "number-one priority." A review of historical and contemporary evidence shows how market forces can address concerns about consumer protection and the soundness of the financial system. The financial services modernization legislation thus should repeal the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act and reform the 1956 Bank Holding Company Act,allow banks to structure their new activities through operating subsidiaries or affiliates,reduce the "moral hazard" of federal deposit insurance by mimicking private bond covenants, andnot raise any new regulatory barriers

CP-Violation in Kaluza-Klein and Randall-Sundrum Theories

The Kaluza-Klein theory and Randall-Sundrum theory are examined comparatively, with focus on the five dimensional (Dirac) fermion and the dimensional reduction to four dimensions. They are treated in the Cartan formalism. The chiral property, localization, anomaly phenomena are examined. The electric and magnetic dipole moment terms naturally appear. The order estimation of the couplings is done. This is a possible origin of the CP-violation.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the Fifth KEK Topical Conference -Frontiers in Flavor Physics

The economics and politics of financial modernization

Financial services industry ; Bank supervision ; Industrial policy

Central counterparty clearing: history, innovation, and regulation

Banks and banking, Central ; Derivative securities

Relaxing to Three Dimensions

We propose a new selection principle for distinguishing among possible vacua that we call the "relaxation principle". The idea is that the universe will naturally select among possible vacua through its cosmological evolution, and the configuration with the biggest filling fraction is the likeliest. We apply this idea to the question of the number of dimensions of space. We show that under conventional (but higher-dimensional) FRW evolution, a universe filled with equal numbers of branes and antibranes will naturally come to be dominated by 3-branes and 7-branes. We show why this might help explain the number of dimensions that are experienced in our visible universe.Comment: 4 pages; minor improvements, references adde

Casimir Energy of 5D Electro-Magnetism and Sphere Lattice Regularization

Casimir energy is calculated in the 5D warped system. It is compared with the flat one. The position/ momentum propagator is exploited. A new regularization, called {\it sphere lattice regularization}, is introduced. It is a direct realization of the geometrical interpretation of the renormalization group. The regularized configuration is closed-string like. We do {\it not} take the KK-expansion approach. Instead the P/M propagator is exploited, combined with the heat-kernel method. All expressions are closed-form (not KK-expanded form). Rigorous quantities are only treated (non-perturbative treatment). The properly regularized form of Casimir energy, is expressed in the closed form. We numerically evaluate its \La(4D UV-cutoff), \om(5D bulk curvature, warpedness parameter) and $T$(extra space IR parameter) dependence.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of WS "Prog. String th. and QFT"(Osaka City Univ., 07.12.7-10

Mapping the American Shareholder Litigation Experience: A Survey of Empirical Studies of the Enforcement of the U.S. Securities Law

In this paper, we provide an overview of the most significant empirical research that has been conducted in recent years on the public and private enforcement of the federal securities laws. The existing studies of the U.S. enforcement system provide a rich tapestry for assessing the value of enforcement, both private and public, as well as market penalties for fraudulent financial reporting practices. The relevance of the U.S. experience is made broader by the introduction through the PSLRA in late 1995 of new procedures for the conduct of private suits and the numerous efforts to evaluate the effects of those provisions. We believe that the evidence reviewed here shows that the PSLRA\u27s provisions have largely achieved their intended purposes. For example, many more private suits are headed by an institutional lead plaintiff, such plaintiffs appear to fulfill the desired role of monitoring the suit\u27s prosecution and their presence is associated with suits yielding better settlements and lower attorneys\u27 fees awards. SEC enforcement efforts, while significant, have tended to focus on weaker targets, suggesting that the big fish get away. Equally importantly, markets impose their own discipline on companies whose managers release false financial reports and, in turn, firms discipline the managers who are responsible for false misleading reporting, perhaps because of the presence of, or potential for, private enforcement actions

Radiating sources in higher-dimensional gravity

We study a time-dependent 5D metric which contains a static 4D sub-metric whose 3D part is spherically symmetric. An expansion in the metric coefficient allow us to obtain close-to Schwarzschild approximation to a class of spherically-symmetric solutions. Using Campbell's embedding theorem and the induced-matter formalism we obtain two 4D solutions. One describes a source with the stiff equation of state believed to be applicable to dense astrophysical objects, and the other describes a spherical source with a radial heat flow.Comment: Latex, 20 pages, no figures. to appear in J. Math. Phy

Search, money and capital: a neoclassical dichotomy

Recent work has reduced the gap between search-based monetary theory and mainstream macroeconomics by incorporating into the search model some centralized markets as well as some decentralized markets where money is essential. This paper takes a further step towards this integration by introducing labor, capital and neoclassical firms. The resulting framework nests the search-theoretic monetary model and a standard neoclassical growth model as special cases. Perhaps surprisingly, it also exhibits a dichotomy: one can determine the equilibrium path for the value of money independently of the paths of consumption, investment and employment in the centralized market.Monetary theory ; Macroeconomics