Global Enforcement against the Financial Industry

The goal of this research project is to empirically study enforcement as law-in-action and to address the following general research question both on a global and Swiss level: What are the key features and trends of enforcement against financial firms and their managers?

Adopting an empirical approach and focusing on a two-decade period (2000-2020), this project consists of two complementary work packages.

The first work package aims at unveiling the “big picture” of enforcement by the main counterpart of financial market participants: financial regulators. By means of an encompassing quantitative analysis, the project aims at covering the entire set of enforcement decisions from the most important financial regulators of the world (8 jurisdictions and 17 regulatory agencies). Statistical tools and text mining techniques will be deployed to uncover the main topics, actors and trends for thousands of cases across time, regulators and countries.

By contrast, the second work package privileges processes rather than outputs. In other words, this part of the project focuses more substantially on how enforcement against the financial industry unfolds and how the different actors involved (i.e., targets, regulators, criminal prosecutors, civil claimants) interact. This will be possible by narrowing a documentary analysis to a set of cross-border high profile cases (between 8 to 10) that attracted most of regulators’, practitioners’ and media attention. All enforcement actions in these high profile cases are subject to research regardless of which countries and of which authorities (criminal, supervisory, other) they originate from and which regulations and laws are enforced.