Risk regulation at transnational level: understanding the role of non-state actors

by Judy van der Graaf, [email protected] Risk, and how it can be managed or regulated, has become a very prominent issue in contemporary society. The financial crisis and the responses to it serve as good illustrations of that. And at a very different level it is visible in our department with the establishment of the new MSc programme Economies, Risk and Society that, amongst various other topics, looks at questions of risk and regulation in economic life. In my PhD research I am especially interested in the challenges that globalization poses to the regulation of risks. In a globalized world with markets spanning multiple nation-states and even continents, risks can transfer quickly and easily. This poses an additional layer of complexity with regard to how risks can be controlled and who can play a role in their control. In my thesis I aim to add to a growing regulation and governance scholarship which argues that regulation should no longer be considered as the prerogative of the state and that we need to develop a greater understanding of sources of control beyond the state

The role of non-state actors in transnational risk regulation: a case study of how the credit rating industry performs regulation

This thesis looks at the role of non-state actors in the regulation of risks. Regulation, conceptualised in this thesis as revolving around the anticipation and management of risks in economic life, is no longer considered to be a purely state-based activity, but is increasingly viewed as an activity that can involve a variety of actors including nonstate actors such as civic organisations and commercial firms. The limits on the ability of states to regulate risks on their own are becoming more and more visible in today’s integrated and interdependent markets. Our thinking about the capacity of the state to control is especially challenged by transnational risks, such as exemplified by the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Transnational risks easily spread across national borders. However, our knowledge about how non-state actors may be and can be involved in the regulation of risks, at both national and transnational levels, is predominantly theoretical and needs to be examined more critically and above all empirically. In this thesis a case study is presented of the credit rating industry. The credit rating industry has recurrently been identified as an important industry with regard to helping manage credit risk in the global debt capital markets. Using data collected through a documentary survey and 31 semi-structured interviews with current and former staff of rating agencies, this thesis explores the extent to which the credit rating industry is involved in three main components of a risk regulation regime: standard-setting, information-gathering, and behaviour-modification. The thesis will show that there are strong indicators that the credit rating industry is exercising regulation even though rating agencies expressly deny being a regulatory actor. It will discuss the ways in which rating agencies set standards of credit risk, gather and analyse vast amounts of information to assess how issuers of debt measure up to these standards, and aim to influence the behaviour of actors in debt capital markets through their rating processes and the credit ratings that they publish

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data