Good bye light touch? Macroeconomic resilience, banking regulation and institutions

With the Great Crisis of 2008-2009 we have witnessed a relevant episode of macroeconomic vulnerability affecting many countries. To what extent such vulnerability has depended upon the design of light touch (LT) banking regulation? And to what extent other institutional factors, different from − as well as complementary to − banking regulation, have contributed to the Great Crisis? The present work offers two contributions: a systematic review of the existing literature on the subject; an empirical analysis conducted on a sample of 102 countries. We observe an Unpleasant Nexus (UN), i.e. that macroeconomic volatility is associated in a robust and systematic way with LT banking regulation. But the UN does not operate in a vacuum. The link between vulnerability and LT banking regulation seems representative of a more general relationship between institutional design and macroeconomic performance. Our analysis shows how various types of institutions – public, political, legal, monetary – also seem to exert an unexpected effect on resilience.