Market Discipline (market + discipline)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Globalization and Prison Privatization: Why Are Most of the World's For-Profit Adult Prisons to Be Found in the American South?

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2007
Phillip J. Wood
For a generation, students of comparative public policy and international politics have argued that global market discipline and the increasing mobility of international "best practices" have given rise to policy convergence at the global level. This paper uses the American case to investigate some of the forces thought to have given rise to the spread of private prisons. It finds that while there are prisons in a number of countries, the evidence of convergence is thin and seems to suggest that the core of the prison privatization is in the American South. It then examines several theories,the political economy of the prison boom and overcrowding, globalization theory, the politics of the new right and the idea of a "prison-industrial complex",that have been used to explain prison privatization and the extent to which they are consistent with the empirical pattern. Each takes us some way to understanding that pattern, but none can provide a clear theoretical mapping. [source]


The Financial Crisis: Causes and Lessons,

JOURNAL OF APPLIED CORPORATE FINANCE, Issue 3 2010
Kenneth E. Scott
The author argues that the root cause of the recent crisis was a housing bubble whose origins can be traced to loose monetary policy and a government housing policy that continually pushed for lower lending standards to increase home ownership. The negative consequences of such policies were amplified when transmitted throughout the financial system by financial institutions through the process of securitization. In attempting to assess culpability for the crisis and identify possible reforms, the author focuses on three categories: 1Defects in Financial Products: Without criticizing derivatives and the process of securitization, the author identifies the sheer complexity of the securities as a major source of the problem,for which the solution is a simpler security design combined with greater disclosure about the underlying assets being securitized. 2Defects in Risk Management: Thanks in large part to agency and other incentive problems, there was universal underestimation of risks by mortgage originators and financial institutions throughout the securitization chain. Changing incentive pay structures is part of the solution, and so are better accounting rules for SPEs. But more effective regulatory oversight and ending "too big to fail" may well be the only way to curb excessive private risk-taking. 3Defects in Government Policy and Regulation: While acknowledging the need for more effective oversight, the author argues that there was ample existing authority for U.S. regulators to have addressed these issues. Lack of power and authority to regulate was not at the heart of the problem,the real problem was lack of foresight and judgment about the unexpected. After expressing doubt that regulators can prevent major financial failures, the author recommends greater attention to devising better methods of resolving such failures when they occur. One of the main goals is to ensure that losses are borne not by taxpayers but by private investors in a way that maintains incentives for market discipline while limiting spillover costs to the entire system. [source]


Discipline and Liquidity in the Interbank Market

JOURNAL OF MONEY, CREDIT AND BANKING, Issue 2-3 2008
THOMAS B. KING
market discipline; federal funds; liquidity; bank risk Using 20 years of panel data, I demonstrate that high-risk banks have consistently paid more than safe banks for interbank loans and have been less likely to use these loans as a source of liquidity. The economic importance of this effect was relatively small until the mid-1990s, when regulatory and institutional changes began to impose more of the costs of bank failure on uninsured creditors. Subsequently, interbank-market price discipline roughly doubled, and risk-based rationing effects increased by a factor of six. In imposing this discipline, lenders seem to care most about credit risk at borrowing institutions. [source]


The Production of Commons and the "Explosion" of the Middle Class

ANTIPODE, Issue 4 2010
Massimo De Angelis
Abstract:, This paper builds on the author's previous theoretical work on the role of processes such as enclosures, market discipline and governance. It discusses the middle class in terms of a stratified field of subjectivity within the planetary wage hierarchy produced by these processes. It discusses the thesis that the middle class, qua middle class, will never be able to contribute to bring about a fundamental change in the capitalist system of livelihood reproduction. The production in common centered on middle class values,however historically and culturally specific they are,is always production in common within the system. Our common action as middle class action, whether as consumers, workers, or citizens, reproduces the system of value and value hierarchy that is the benchmark, the referent point for our cooperation. The paper then discusses some of the implications of the conundrum faced by those who seek alternatives: there will be no "beginning of history" without the middle class, nor there will be one with the middle class. [source]


Testing the Regulatory Model: The Expansion of Stansted Airport

FISCAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2004
DAVID STARKIE
This paper examines the application of price-cap regulation to the UK airport industry, with particular reference to the expansion of London-Stansted. This expansion is relevant to the debate concerning investment incentives inherent in the RPI,X approach and whether the UK style of regulation encourages the ,sweating of assets' at the expense of new investment. Stansted's expansion also suggests a willingness of the authorities to accept the leveraging of market power in pursuit of perceived public-interest goals; it provides an insight into the behaviour of economic agents when capital market disciplines are mute; and it illustrates some unintended consequences that can follow from market intervention. [source]