Financial regulation: what the finance industry wants and how it gets it

金融监管的目的是为稳定、有竞争力的金融体系提供基础，为实体经济和社会服务。如果这种金融监管被行业利益所抓住，这一目标就会受到威胁。本研究项目的目的是研究金融业对新金融监管的影响。该项目的主要创新是一种衡量金融部门政策偏好的新方法，这是评估游说影响的重要先决条件。竞选捐款对政策选择影响的实证鉴定面临许多挑战。首先，一个主要问题是如何衡量特殊利益集团的政策偏好。第二，贡献是内生的。政客们可能会迎合金融部门，因为他们收到了捐款，或者因为他们已经致力于他们的观点。该项目通过使用定量文本分析方法和包含1700封金融利益集团提交给美国国会的信函的数据集构建了金融部门政策偏好的新衡量标准，解决了这些实证挑战，这些信函包含了他们对金融监管法案的立场。这种新颖的方法可以在很长一段时间内使用大量的法案来研究政治迎合金融部门的利益，而现有的研究只关注一个或几个政策问题。这种方法提高了外部有效性，并允许使用政治家固定效应来解释政党活动和未观察到的政治家对亲金融部门政策的意识形态偏好的影响。

Financial regulation aims to provide a foundation for a stable, competitive financial system, which serves the real economy and society. This objective is endangered if this financial regulation is captured by industry interests. The aim of this research project is to study the influence of the finance industry on new financial regulation. The main innovation of the project is a novel measure of financial sector policy preferences, an important prerequisite to assess lobby influence.The empirical identification of the effect of campaign contributions on policy choices faces a number of challenges. Firstly, one of the major problems is how to measure policy preferences of special interest groups. Secondly, contributions are endogenous. Politicians might cater to the financial sector because they received contributions, or because they were already committed to their views. The project addresses these empirical challenges by constructing a new measure of financial sector policy preferences using quantitative textual analysis methods and a dataset with 1700 letters of financial interest groups to the US congress containing their position on financial regulation bills. This novel measure allows studying political catering to financial sector interest using a large number of bills over a long period, while existing studies focus only on one or just a few policy issues. This method improves external validity and allows accounting for the effects of party activity and unobserved ideological preferences of politicians for pro-financial sector policies using politician fixed effects.