How I Accidentally Wrote a Paper on Supervisory Transparency in the European Union and Why You Should Too
Research is an unpredictable thing. You head in one direction, but end up going another. Here is a recent example: A co-author and I had an idea for a paper. It's a long story, but basically we wanted to compare banks in the US to those in the EU. This was a situation where our desire to explore a theory was egged on by, what we believed, was available data. In the US it's easy to gather data on banks because the regulators have a nice website where they release the filings banks send them. The data is in a really good format for statistical analysis. US done. We thought our next move would be to quickly gather similar data for EU banks and we would be on our way. First we contacted the UK's Financial Conduct Authority . Surprisingly, they told us that not only did they not release this data, but it was actually illegal for them to do so. Pretty frustrating. Answers to one question stymied by a lack of data. Argh. I guess we'll just keep looking to see what kind of...