استفاده از جبران خسارت معوق برای تقویت اصول اخلاقی مقررات مالی

Defects in the corporate governance of government-owned enterprises tempt opportunistic officials to breach duties of public stewardship. Corporate-governance theory suggests that incentive-based deferred compensation could intensify the force that common-law duties actually exert on regulatory managers. In principle, a forfeitable fund of deferred compensation could be combined with provisions for measuring, verifying, and rewarding multiperiod performance to make top regulators accountable for maximizing the long-run net social benefits their enterprise produces. Because government deposit-insurance enterprises are purveyors of credit enhancements for which private substitute and reinsurance markets exist, their performance could be measured accurately enough to make employment contracts for deposit-insurance CEOs a promising place to experiment with this kind of accountability reform.

As information and deal-making factories, financial institutions create value by supplying services that lower the costs that surplus and deficit spending units incur in negotiating and executing financial contracts. In intermediating flows of information between actual and potential counterparties, a financial institution not only collects, verifies, and analyzes information, it also moves the information it processes over internal and external communications networks. To keep its customers satisfied, an institution must work efficiently, and the accuracy, security, and confidentiality of its information exchanges must be credibly maintained. All modern societies regulate financial institutions and they do this for compelling reasons. Regulatory services generate net social value when they enhance transactional convenience and customer confidence in low-cost ways. Acting as trusted and disinterested outside parties, teams of private and governmental financial regulators can minimize coordination costs by overseeing the accuracy and confidentiality of information flows to customers, harmonizing inter-firm and network transactions, standardizing contracting protocols, and guaranteeing contract performance. Although complying and monitoring compliance with specific restrictions are costly processes, regulation is on balance a valuable product because it generates aggregate benefits for society and/or for the industry being regulated and these benefits exceed their costs. It is the net benefits – and not the services themselves – that customers and institutions value. It is instructive to view financial services as supplied jointly by financial institutions and their regulators. This joint production means that international trade in financial services empowers customers to choose not just between domestic and foreign suppliers of financial products, but also between host-country and home-country systems of regulation. In financial services, customer choice focuses not just on the stand-alone capacity of the institutions with which the customer formally deals, but also on differences in the cost and quality of the supervisory and guarantee services on which informationally disadvantaged customers rely in assessing the liquidity and safety of the products selected. The value that regulated institutions can fairly attribute to the services of a given regulatory enterprise depends on the mix of purposes that its regulatory CEO pursues and on the efficiency with which its managers accumulate and deploy enterprise resources. Of course, a regulator's resources include the value of whatever implicit and explicit government guarantees the enterprise can command. 1.1. Regulatory relationships Like the financial-services business itself, financial regulation is a relationship business. Regulated institutions and their regulators contract to do a range of repeat business with each other for an indeterminate time. Although clients exert discipline on high-cost regulators by migrating their business to other producers of regulatory services, regulatory activity need not always be efficient in the short run. Neither party can recontract either moment to moment or transaction to transaction. If either side wishes to dissolve the relationship, it must absorb a substantial switching cost. Public-choice theory emphasizes that regulation is not always intended to be socially benign. In particular, a regulator's ability to support and enforce cartel-like behavior among its clients subjects it to constant political pressure to produce subsidies and use its coordination powers to generate monopoly profits for incumbent institutions. Fig. 1 diagrams the contradictory pressures under which government regulators must operate. On the supply side of each regulatory relationship, regulators trade benefits to client regulatees for engaging in conforming behaviors and threaten penalties for non-conforming activity. Although regulatory services generate a mix of public, bureaucratic, and private benefits, officials are reluctant to acknowledge that incentive conflicts influence their policy decisions. This reluctance leads officials to employ “spin doctors” whose job is to credibly misinform taxpayer–voters about what is at stake in proposals that would changes in either financial rules or enforcement practices.

This paper focuses on the problem of improving public-service managerial contracts in order to reduce the temptation to engage in opportunistic behavior that existing information asymmetries pose. It proposes a way for taxpayers to offset the unethical incentive compensation that financial institutions may be expected to offer in exchange for regulatory subsidies. An advantage of this contracting solution is that it can compensate for gaps in politicians' half-hearted efforts to identify and outlaw unethical campaign contributions and other forms of laundered side payments. The globalization of financial markets and institutions tends to heighten competition between alternative regulatory systems (Kane, 1999). While heightened international competition tends to displace poor systems of regulation by better ones, the maximal effective improvement in any country is limited by the level of the best-practice regulation that can be found elsewhere. To markedly boost the level of best practices requires fundamental improvements in the corporate governance of government regulatory enterprises. A feasible start in this direction is to intensify the incentive force of the duties that officials owe taxpayers by instituting a scheme of forfeitable deferred compensation for heads of deposit-insurance enterprises. An ideal deferred-compensation scheme would simultaneously increase the human-capital risk that individual CEOs would face for tolerating poor performance and offer just compensation to every CEO willing to conscientiously embrace this risk.