The paper examines the nexus of foreign ownership and competition which is at the center of recent mandates for coordination between competition and regulation policies. We match estimates of market power with ownership data for 949 banks in 26 European countries over 1997-2013. We show that well-capitalised banks tend to enjoy high monopoly rents through cost-cutting strategies after entering emerging markets via M&As. Foreign presence has a U-shaped relationship with market power in the developed Europe, where Greenfield investments appear also as a mechanism through which country-level foreign presence leads to lower mark-ups. The results are robust to various specifications that address parameter heterogeneity and selection bias.

From the inception of money market funds (MMFs), all MMFs reported a fixed $1 NAV (Net Asset Value). In July 2014, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued new regulations for MMFs that require Prime institutional MMFs to report floating NAVs. The SEC did not expect a significant impact on the MMF industry from requiring floating NAVs for Prime institutional funds. We find that over 70% of the assets under management in Prime MMFs left Prime funds with over half the Prime funds closing. We find that more than half of the Prime retail MMFs (which are not required to switch to floating NAV) closed with more than 50% of the assets under management exiting these funds. Finally, we find that for every dollar that exited Prime MMFs a dollar was added to Government MMFs. Based on the SEC's economic discussions, these results all represent unexpected consequences.

We use Finnish OMX Helsinki data to examine the relationship between demographic variables, individual investors' broker choices and trade informativeness. We find that men prefer to use Full-Service-Retail over Discount-Retail brokers and that a higher level of income leads to a higher likelihood of using Discount-Retail brokers. Women present more heterogenous broker choice behaviors. However, both genders are more likely to carry out larger trades through Discount-Retail brokers. We show that trades executed via Discount-Retail brokers are more informative than those of Full-Service-Retail brokers and that only Discount-Retail brokers show trade informativeness differences across gender after controlling for age. Collectively, women make more informative trades then men, but this result reverses after partitioning by age. We conclude that conditioning on the type of broker reduces unobserved individual investor heterogeneity and that demographic variables are essential to the understanding of broker clientele effect. Furthermore, clientele differences observed across broker types are market specific and dominate the effects of financial advice in determining trade informativeness.

We develop metrics to assess the complexity of a bank holding company (BHC), based on its ownership structure. Large BHCs have intricate ownership hierarchies involving hundreds or even thousands of legal entities that may contribute to increased operational risk and greater opacity. Our measures are mathematically grounded, intuitive, and easy to implement. They may be particularly useful in the context of resolution, where regulators often face significant time pressure and coordination challenges. We use regulatory filing data from the Federal Reserve to validate the measures, demonstrating that they provide a useful complement to balance sheet information in assessing BHC complexity. Notably, the proposed measures are highly correlated with existing complexity indicators that are not based on organizational structure and are less correlated with size than these existing complexity measures. We show that the proposed measures provide additional explanatory power for the regulatory indicators, even after controlling for size.