REGEM Programm

Confronted with the dynamics of global capital markets, national governments and intergovernmental institutions face new tasks. Promoting capital inflows has become a key objective of national economic policy. In view of an accelerating change of technologies, products and trading systems, national governments are presently undertaking considerable efforts at reorganizing the regulation of capital markets. Simultaneously, transnational and international regulatory cooperation is also passing through a period of fundamental reorganization.
The Research Group on Equity Market Regulation (REGEM) starts from the assumption that capital market reforms cannot simply be interpreted as driven by the search for higher allocative efficiency and technological / organizational innovation. Capital market reforms must also be understood as the outcome of political negotiations and interest group activity: as the result of a political process that produces new institutions and is driven by the interplay of national regulation, transnational economic actors, intergovernmental regulatory cooperation and global capital markets. REGEM will examine these interrelations by studying the national, transnational and intergovernmental dynamics of equity market regulation.
What is new about the approach of this research group? The analysis of equity market regulation requires an integrated perspective which simultaneously takes economic and political factors into account. In order to achieve this, new approaches of institutional research in the fields of economics and political science (New Institutional Economics, Public Choice, Neoinstitutionalism, with a special emphasis on theories of regulation) shall be applied with the aim of practicing an integrated "real" political economy that Douglass North (Nobel prize winner for economics) has repeatedly encouraged.
The research group has already done some groundwork by dealing with the political economy of the Greater China economic area, particularly with issues of economic reform policy and equity market regulation. The field of research will gradually be extended to issues which transcend the Asia Pacific region.