금융감독기구의 규제거버넌스와 금융안정성

While a great number of researchers focused on corporate governance in the nonfinancial sector, corporate governance of financial institutions received little attention both in academic and policy-making arenas. This phenomenon seriously contrasts with the widely shared recognition that the financial sector plays a key role in the economy. Naturally, attention to the corporate governance aspects of regulatory or supervisory organiz-ations of the financial sector, i.e., regulatory governance, was almost nil. However, ever since the mid-1990s, more and more researchers have paid attention to the governance of financial sector supervisors. The debate has involved wider discussion about the appropriate institutional organization of financial supervision and also about international best practices in the regulatory field. The number of publications concerning this topic is increasing fast recently. Especially, the quality of empirical work is improving as well. Both researchers and policy makers appear to have been convinced solidly, upon being faced with the several liquidity crises in the 1990s, that the regulatory governance can actually affect the behavior of finance sector,and ultimately can contribute to preserving financial stability in their countries. We firmly believe that this conviction has been the primary motivation that underlies the active research in recent years. The purposes of this paper are two-fold. The first is to test the effect of independence, accountability, and transparency, considered as main pillars for regulatory governance of a financial supervisory agency, on banking stability. For this goal, we constructed a panel data set for 55 countries. The data set includes both developed and non-developed countries. Also,the levels of the various indices reflecting representative regulatory governance varied significantly across observations. Another objective of this paper is to systematically survey the vast set of existing theoretical and empirical studies related to this topic. Although there have been literature surveys by researchers mostly in their introductory sections, the survey undertaken in this paper is unique and much more comprehensive. The survey first classifies theoretical literature by chronolo-gical order, sub-themes or main focuses, and the evolutionary path of main arguments. It subsequently examines empirical literature by the dependent variable reflecting financial stability, main explanatory variables, analytical methods, data sources, and empirical findings. For the empirical analysis, we have indexed ‘financial stability’, a ‘factor’difficult to define, using several related financial variables through the factor analysis. The resulting proxy for financial stability showed a high degree of variation among observations. For the independence and accountability measures, we respectively used the ‘supervisory independence index’and the ‘supervisory accountability index’calculated by Masciandaro et al. (2008). Furthermore, we utilized the survey index from the updated version of Barth et al. (2006) in order to test the effect of supervisory agency’s transparency which has recently been argued to play an important role in curbing the ‘private incentive’of the supervisor. Three major results were obtained from the empirical analysis. First,the proposition that the improvement in governance index has a positive influence on financial stability does not hold for all nations. Second, the level of economic development, which is frequently mentioned in monetary policy studies, did not show any variation in the effect of regulatory governance either. Third, the financial stability enhancement effect of the governance was significant in the group of nations in which regulatory governance is not yet established. Particularly, as Korea performed under average for all factors of regulatory governance among the sample countries, the implications of the ‘discriminatory effect’hypothesis are worth taking into consideration. Korea is ranked at the 17th among 55 countries. According to a rough simulation,just for illustrative purposes, an increase in the indices of independence,accountability, and transparency of Korea by 10% would improve the ranking to 13th, 12th, and 14th, respectively. We expect that this paper will offer useful insights, both directly and indirectly, into the discussion on the institutional design including future reforms in the financial supervisory system. In conclusion, we suggest a proposition that, despite the overall empirical legitimacy of the argument regarding regulatory governance, its effect on financial stability can vary across countries depending on the current level of regulatory governance and other factors such as the one which measures the degree to which regulators can pursue their private incentives.