Regulating Risk

This publication presents recent OECD papers on risk and regulatory policy. They offer measures for developing, or improving, coherent risk governance policies.

In the current business climate the impact of the volume and nature of regulatory change and the regulatory risk arising from this is a significant business risk for regulated firms and regulators alike. As a consequence, management of this risk is increasingly high on the board agenda of regulated firms, with those business functions whose activities support this, such as Compliance, facing increasing levels of challenge in their efforts to be effective. The Changing Face of Compliance addresses core aspects of this challenge, considering the relationship between regulation and compliance and key influences on both, offering insight into the effectiveness of current approaches and addressing practical compliance challenges. Sharon Ward explains how the role of Compliance might be strengthened and those who work within it further enabled to support the current focus on improving standards in business, offering recommendations for enhancing this role. The text includes a mix of hands-on advice, examples and research based on the experiences of practitioners, educators and regulators drawn from across a wide range of jurisdictions and sectors. This is a thoughtful and timely book, whether you are concerned about the growing and changing implications of regulatory risk; the benefit of leveraging additional value from your Compliance function or your own Compliance role; or ways of transforming and sustaining the function to ensure its continued relevance to the business.

The regulation of potentially hazardous substances has become a controversial issue. This volume evaluates past efforts to develop and use risk assessment guidelines, reviews the experience of regulatory agencies with different administrative arrangements for risk assessment, and evaluates various proposals to modify procedures. The book's conclusions and recommendations can be applied across the entire field of environmental health.

In this paper, we provide an overview of the concerns surrounding the variations in the calculation of risk-weighted assets (RWAs) across banks and jurisdictions and how this might undermine the Basel III capital adequacy framework. We discuss the key drivers behind the differences in these calculations, drawing upon a sample of systemically important banks from Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. We then discuss a range of policy options that could be explored to fix the actual and perceived problems with RWAs, and improve the use of risk-sensitive capital ratios.

The public depends on competent risk assessment from the federal government and the scientific community to grapple with the threat of pollution. When risk reports turn out to be overblownâ€"or when risks are overlookedâ€"public skepticism abounds. This comprehensive and readable book explores how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can improve its risk assessment practices, with a focus on implementation of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. With a wealth of detailed information, pertinent examples, and revealing analysis, the volume explores the "default option" and other basic concepts. It offers two views of EPA operations: The first examines how EPA currently assesses exposure to hazardous air pollutants, evaluates the toxicity of a substance, and characterizes the risk to the public. The second, more holistic, view explores how EPA can improve in several critical areas of risk assessment by focusing on cross-cutting themes and incorporating more scientific judgment. This comprehensive volume will be important to the EPA and other agencies, risk managers, environmental advocates, scientists, faculty, students, and concerned individuals.

Why are vast sums spent on controlling some risks but not others? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? These key questions are explored as this text exposes the components of risk regulation systems.

The evolution of risk management has resulted from the interplay of financial crises, risk management practices, and regulatory actions. In the 1970s, research lay the intellectual foundations for the risk management practices that were systematically implemented in the 1980s as bond trading revolutionized Wall Street. Quants developed dynamic hedging, Value-at-Risk, and credit risk models based on the insights of financial economics. In parallel, the Basel I framework created a level playing field among banks across countries. Following the 1987 stock market crash, the near failure of Salomon Brothers, and the failure of Drexel Burnham Lambert, in 1996 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published the Market Risk Amendment to the Basel I Capital Accord; the amendment went into effect in 1998. It led to a migration of bank risk management practices toward market risk regulations. The framework was further developed in the Basel II Accord, which, however, from the very beginning, was labeled as being procyclical due to the reliance of capital requirements on contemporaneous volatility estimates. Indeed, the failure to measure and manage risk adequately can be viewed as a key contributor to the 2008 global financial crisis. Subsequent innovations in risk management practices have been dominated by regulatory innovations, including capital and liquidity stress testing, macroprudential surcharges, resolution regimes, and countercyclical capital requirements.

Subject: The modern regulatory world is crowded with ideas about different regulatory approaches including, among others: performance-based regulation, self-regulation, light-touch regulation, right-touch regulation, safety management systems, 3rd party regulation, co-regulation, prescriptive regulation, risk-based regulation, a harm-reduction approach, problem-solving, and responsive regulation. Are these various terms merely rhetorical, or aspirational? Do they signal the political preferences of the times? Which of them actually affect operations? Professional regulators--along with everyone else in the risk-control business--face a complex array of choices when they design (or redesign) their strategies and structures, programs, work-flows, relationships, and day-to-day operations. What regulators choose to do, and how they choose to do it, greatly affects their effectiveness, as well as the quality of life in a democracy. This book tackles five major design issues that affect all regulators (and can be applied by anyone else in the risk-control business). It demystifies the various labels and vogue prescriptions for regulatory conduct, clarifies the options, and generates a range of distinct ideas about what it might mean to be a "risk-based regulator." Audience: This book is designed primarily for regulatory practitioners, but will be relevant for other professionals whose roles include risk-management and harm-reduction. In the public sector, this includes law-enforcement and public-safety organizations, as well as security and intelligence agencies. In the private sector it includes compliance managers, safety officers and risk-managers. In the not-for-profit sector this includes any organization that takes on, or contributes to, harm-reduction missions. Author: Professor Malcolm K. Sparrow, of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, has been working with senior officials in regulatory and enforcement agencies for over 30 years. Prior to joining Harvard's faculty in 1988, he served ten years with the British Police Service, rising to the rank of Detective Chief Inspector. He has authored eight other books, including The Regulatory Craft (Brookings, 2000) and The Character of Harms (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He chairs Harvard's Executive Program: "Strategic Management of Regulatory & Enforcement Agencies." Contents: This book is designed, in the context of a pandemic, to substitute for five core lectures/discussions that would normally be delivered face-to-face in executive-level courses and workshops. Professor Sparrow offers these lectures here in a comfortably accessible and conversational style. Each chapter describes a different dimension of choice, inviting readers to assess their own organization's history and habits as a precursor to figuring out whether, looking forward, some adjustment is warranted or desirable. Each chapter contains a collection of "Frequently Asked Questions" reflecting practitioners' common queries about the concepts presented, and ends with a "Diagnostic Exercise" (a set of probing questions) that readers can use, perhaps with colleagues in a book-group, to apply the analysis in their own setting. Online Teaching: Individual chapters can be assigned as "asynchronous study assignments" for courses on regulatory practice. Students, feeling "all screened out," may appreciate the availability of the paperback edition.