Termine & Aktivitäten

Di. 04.06.2024

The Max Planck Institute for Social Studies (MPIfG) cordially invites you to attend the Scholar in Residence Lectures 2024 on June 4 and 18. Bașak Kuș from Wesleyan University is the MPIfG Scholar in Residence 2024.

In the three lectures of her series “Trade-Offs: The State, Economistic Thinking, and Risk Regulation in the Age of Crises” she will share insights into how governments conceptualize and mitigate risk, and the significant role that economists and economistic reasoning play in shaping these processes.

June 4, 2024 | There Is More to It Than the Repeal of Glass-Steagall: Drifting, Micro, and Information-Based Financial Regulation

The transformation of the American regulatory approach was informed by theories put forward by economists like Stigler, Buchanan, and Niskanen in the 1970s, who problematized regulatory capture, rent-seeking, and bureaucratic inefficiencies, as the first lecture highlights.

As the proponents of these theories assumed roles in the highest echelons of American bureaucracy, the government’s approach to risk regulation shifted from direct and substantive oversight towards promoting private risk regulation based on market discipline and individual rationality.

Further instrumental in this transformation was the ascendance of financial economics in the 1990s. While much of the neoliberalism literature focuses narrowly on deregulation as the main policy face of this paradigmatic change, the resulting transformation in the policy landscape was actually much more multifaceted.

I discuss in this lecture how regulatory drift and the ascendance of micro-oriented and information-based approaches to risk regulation were as consequential as deregulation, if not more so, in terms of the way government tackled financial markets, systemic risk, and consumer financial protection. more

Bașak Kuș is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. A central question drives her diverse research interests: How do governments conceptualize and respond to crises and risks across different fields, whether the financial sector, climate change, or national security?

Professor Kuș is the author of Disembedded: Regulation, Crisis, and Democracy in the Age of Finance (Oxford University Press). more …

Please note that the lecture will take place in person at the MPIfG in Cologne. An online participation is not possible.