Socio-Economic Review, forthcoming

Regulatory initiatives are frequently shaped by the ability of the financial industry to build alliances across the wider business community. Yet comparative and international political economy scholarship remains divided over how to explain the resulting networks of financial lobbying. Using quantitative text analysis of 8000 responses to EU financial regulatory consultations between 2010 and 2018, we map patterns of lobbying coordination based on co-signing and text re-use in consultation responses for the first time. This unique dataset is used to analyse hitherto hidden patterns of domestic and cross-border coordination by financial organizations within and between European countries. We find that while distinctive national lobbying networks persist at the country level, the internationalization of financial actors is statistically associated with the formation of coordination ties with foreign financial actors. This suggests that European financial integration has facilitated the emergence of new cross-border alliances which complement – rather than substitute for – existing domestic financial interest coalitions. We argue that the text-as-data approach employed here makes an important new contribution to scholarship on business power and the political economy of Europe.

Financial crises are often presented as triggers for important innovations in international regulation of financial markets, but existing evidence for this claim primarily derive from the analyses of individ- ual initiatives, assessed against noncomparable benchmarks. In order to provide systematic evidence of financial crises’ impact on international financial regulatory change, this paper develops a novel text- as-data approach to measure regulatory novelty. We use this approach to analyze the full population of international banking and securities standards between 1975 and 2016. Contrary to theoretical expecta- tions, our empirical findings indicate rules designed by international banking and securities regulators following financial crises are on average as likely to build on existing international regulations as those designed before a crisis. We also find that international banking rules published after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis are an important exception.