Financial Supervision Architectures: Economics, Politics, Institutions and Law

The objective of this paper was to analyze the tendency to consolidate the financial supervision architecture so as to determine its possible causes. The approach was to consider the supervisory framework with one or more authorities as a dependent latent variable determined by the lawmaker, which can be influenced in turn by the institutional and economic characteristics of his own country. Looking for common determinants in the decision each country takes in these years to maintain or reform its supervisory architecture, we model the lawmakers' decisions with ordered probit and logit functions with a dataset for 68 countries. The empirical analysis highlighted that the level of financial supervision consolidation seems to depend on the institutional factor (represented by the central bank role), the financial factor, the political factor and the legal factor, while the effect of the economic and geographical factors seems negligible.