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Working Paper
Using U.S. Business Registry Data to Corroborate Corporate Identity: Case Study of the Legal Entity Identifier
This paper offers a fresh perspective on fundamental issues in using official incorporation records to corroborate the identity of corporate entities by comparing two publicly-available sets of information, namely, business registry incorporation records and reference data from the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) system, with some focus on the monitoring function performed by LEI issuers as agents for LEI data users. Three modes of analysis are used to consider these issues, high-level analysis of LEI system data about U.S. entities with LEIs, interviews conducted with U.S. business registries, ...
Working Paper
Clean Money, High Costs?
A cornerstone of the law-and-finance literature is that stronger institutions reduce financial intermediation costs. Using global data on cross-border payment costs, I show this relationship can reverse in heavily regulated sectors. Anti-money laundering risks have larger cost effects in advanced economies with strong enforcement than in developing countries with weak enforcement, despite the former having lower underlying risks. This counterintuitive pattern reflects strong institutions operating through two channels: Directly reducing costs through risk mitigation and forcing risk-based ...