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

金融监管旨在为稳定、有竞争力的金融体系提供基础，为实体经济和社会服务。如果这一金融监管被行业利益所俘获，这一目标就会受到威胁。本研究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前提。竞选捐款对政策选择的影响的经验识别面临着许多挑战。首先，主要问题之一是如何衡量特殊利益群体的政策偏好。其次，贡献是内生的。政客们可能会迎合金融业，因为他们收到了捐款，或者因为他们已经致力于自己的观点。该项目通过使用定量文本分析方法构建一个衡量金融部门政策偏好的新指标，以及一个包含1700封提交给美国国会的金融利益团体信函的数据集，其中包含它们对金融监管法案的立场，从而解决了这些经验上的挑战。这一新措施允许在很长一段时间内使用大量法案来研究政治上迎合金融部门利益的问题，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，并允许使用政客固定效应来计算政党活动的影响，以及政客对支持金融部门政策的未被观察到的意识形态偏好。

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.