Regulatory Announcements Research Articles

Demystifying COVID-19 policy actions: The case of inflation control in ASEAN

In this paper, we study the impact of policy actions undertaken by governments and other policy authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic on core inflation in four major economies of ASEAN region namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Utilizing panel fixed effects regression, we find that policy interventions where financial authority and the central governments were the implementing institutions as significantly impacting the inflation. Further, delving into specific policy tools, our study finds evidence of significant impact of regulatory announcement and rules and miscellaneous prudential rules on core inflation. Our investigation is preliminary, but it provides insights into additional understanding of the effectiveness of policy actions in controlling inflation.

The impact of regulation on cryptocurrency market volatility in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic — evidence from China

This paper aims to examine the impact of regulatory policies on cryptocurrency market volatility in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that price volatility, liquidity volatility, and return volatility in the cryptocurrency market increased significantly following regulatory announcements by Chinese policymakers targeting the cryptocurrency industry, and this effect was more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic. It indicates that investors are paying a great deal of attention to such events. Yet further findings suggest that as the risk of pandemic transmission increases and stock market returns decline, investor response to regulation decreases. Our findings also suggest that while regulation typically brings market volatility in cryptocurrencies, the release of regulatory policies can instead be beneficial to the stability of the cryptocurrency market when investors are in an highly greedy mood.

Design, Fabrication, and Applications of SERS Substrates for Food Safety Detection: Review.

Sustainable and safe food is an important issue worldwide, and it depends on cost-effective analysis tools with good sensitivity and reality. However, traditional standard chemical methods of food safety detection, such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography (GC), and tandem mass spectrometry (MS), have the disadvantages of high cost and long testing time. Those disadvantages have prevented people from obtaining sufficient risk information to confirm the safety of their products. In addition, food safety testing, such as the bioassay method, often results in false positives or false negatives due to little rigor preprocessing of samples. So far, food safety analysis currently relies on the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), polymerase chain reaction (PCR), HPLC, GC, UV-visible spectrophotometry, and MS, all of which require significant time to train qualified food safety testing laboratory operators. These factors have hindered the development of rapid food safety monitoring systems, especially in remote areas or areas with a relative lack of testing resources. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has emerged as one of the tools of choice for food safety testing that can overcome these dilemmas over the past decades. SERS offers advantages over chromatographic mass spectrometry analysis due to its portability, non-destructive nature, and lower cost implications. However, as it currently stands, Raman spectroscopy is a supplemental tool in chemical analysis, reinforcing and enhancing the completeness and coverage of the food safety analysis system. SERS combines portability with non-destructive and cheaper detection costs to gain an advantage over chromatographic mass spectrometry analysis. SERS has encountered many challenges in moving toward regulatory applications in food safety, such as quantitative accuracy, poor reproducibility, and instability of large molecule detection. As a result, the reality of SERS, as a screening tool for regulatory announcements worldwide, is still uncommon. In this review article, we have compiled the current designs and fabrications of SERS substrates for food safety detection to unify all the requirements and the opportunities to overcome these challenges. This review is expected to improve the interest in the sensing field of SERS and facilitate the SERS applications in food safety detection in the future.

The Effect of Countries' Independent Regulation on Cryptocurrency Markets

Cryptocurrencies have increasingly been traded against fiat currencies and as a result, governments globally have been trying to regulate these largely decentralized currencies. In this study, event study methodology has been used to evaluate the effect of regulatory announcements made by 25 countries. Based on cryptocurrency usage and returns of three major cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin, Ether, and XRP, this study finds that regulatory news results in significant abnormal returns for Bitcoin and Ether, but not for XRP. The authors find that irrespective of the type of news, abnormal returns are almost always negative. The countries have also been clustered based on their abnormal returns and it has been found that country characteristics such as income level, technological readiness and innovation potential affect the magnitude of abnormal returns. Thus, cryptocurrencies being global in essence, their regulatory oversight in countries do not exist in isolation, but they are also affected by the countries' development.

Data modeling and NLP-based scoring method to assess the relevance of environmental regulatory announcements

The constantly growing body of global environmental legislation necessitates that corporate environmental compliance managers frequently assess the relevance of new regulations and regulation revisions for each of their sites. Companies are pressured to streamline and automate this crucial task through digital workflows and specialized IT-based assistance systems. This has recently piqued the interest of researchers working in different disciplines, such as intelligent systems, machine learning, and natural language processing. The article describes the latest results of our long-term research program on IT-based support for corporate compliance management, offering insights for these, and other disciplines. The context and the main aspects of environmental regulation announcements and the relevance assessment task are analyzed. An extensive conceptual data model is developed that serves as a foundation for tailoring a generic method to perform a relevance assessment that considers site-specific individual environmental compliance facts. The method uses heuristic data operations and various text processing techniques from the field of natural language understanding. In order to exemplify the method, two application scenarios are described in which the relevance of new waste management directives are assessed for a multi-site production company.

What do we know about the stock markets’ reaction to regulatory announcements regarding financial institutions? Evidence from UK financial institutions

What do we know about the stock markets’ reaction to regulatory announcements regarding financial institutions? Evidence from UK financial institutions

Risk substitution in cryptocurrencies: Evidence from BRICS announcements

We investigate the impact of BRICS regulatory announcements on cryptocurrency volatilities and returns. Results evidence risk substitutions after announcements moving from ETH, XRP and LTC to BTC and vice versa, with BTC having volatility reactions to regulatory announcements that differ from those of other cryptocurrencies. Bootstrap quantile regression indicates a stronger detrimental impact of announcements when BTC is currently manifesting lower volatility and higher daily returns. Robustness checks confirm our findings, as well as evidence that the cryptocurrencies in our sample are considerably more reactive to BRICS announcements than US Fed announcements, suggesting important linkages between emerging markets and cryptocurrencies.

Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Social Media Analysis for Pharmacovigilance of COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United Kingdom: Observational Study.

Background The rollout of vaccines for COVID-19 in the United Kingdom started in December 2020. Uptake has been high, and there has been a subsequent reduction in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths among vaccinated individuals. However, vaccine hesitancy remains a concern, in particular relating to adverse effects following immunization (AEFIs). Social media analysis has the potential to inform policy makers about AEFIs being discussed by the public as well as public attitudes toward the national immunization campaign.Objective We sought to assess the frequency and nature of AEFI-related mentions on social media in the United Kingdom and to provide insights on public sentiments toward COVID-19 vaccines.Methods We extracted and analyzed over 121,406 relevant Twitter and Facebook posts, from December 8, 2020, to April 30, 2021. These were thematically filtered using a 2-step approach, initially using COVID-19–related keywords and then using vaccine- and manufacturer-related keywords. We identified AEFI-related keywords and modeled their word frequency to monitor their trends over 2-week periods. We also adapted and utilized our recently developed hybrid ensemble model, which combines state-of-the-art lexicon rule–based and deep learning–based approaches, to analyze sentiment trends relating to the main vaccines available in the United Kingdom.Results Our COVID-19 AEFI search strategy identified 46,762 unique Facebook posts by 14,346 users and 74,644 tweets (excluding retweets) by 36,446 users over the 4-month period. We identified an increasing trend in the number of mentions for each AEFI on social media over the study period. The most frequent AEFI mentions were found to be symptoms related to appetite (n=79,132, 14%), allergy (n=53,924, 9%), injection site (n=56,152, 10%), and clots (n=43,907, 8%). We also found some rarely reported AEFIs such as Bell palsy (n=11,909, 2%) and Guillain-Barre syndrome (n=9576, 2%) being discussed as frequently as more well-known side effects like headache (n=10,641, 2%), fever (n=12,707, 2%), and diarrhea (n=16,559, 3%). Overall, we found public sentiment toward vaccines and their manufacturers to be largely positive (58%), with a near equal split between negative (22%) and neutral (19%) sentiments. The sentiment trend was relatively steady over time and had minor variations, likely based on political and regulatory announcements and debates.Conclusions The most frequently discussed COVID-19 AEFIs on social media were found to be broadly consistent with those reported in the literature and by government pharmacovigilance. We also detected potential safety signals from our analysis that have been detected elsewhere and are currently being investigated. As such, we believe our findings support the use of social media analysis to provide a complementary data source to conventional knowledge sources being used for pharmacovigilance purposes.

Therapeutic Delivery: Industry Update Covering January 2022

This industry update covers the period from January 1 through January 31, 2022, and is based on information sourced from company press releases, scientific literature, patents andnews websites. January 2022 saw Janssen and Midatech expand their collaboration on bioresorbable polymer microsphere technology for drug delivery. Takeda announced its plans to acquire UK-based Adaptate Biotherapeutics and Gandeeva raised further investment funds to support its drug discovery and development platform focused on the evaluation of protein-drug interactions. Biogen announced that it will sell its stake in a biosimilars joint ventureand ABL Bio and Sanofi announced a collaboration around a novel treatment for Parkinson's disease. New regulatory announcements this month included USFDA approvals of a new insomnia treatment for Idorsia and a treatment for atopic dermatitis developed by Pfizer. Insulet gained FDA clearance for a closed-loop insulin pump andAscendis Pharmafollowed up its United States approval last year for a once-weekly treatment for growth hormone deficiency with European approval. Pfizer and Ionis announced the discontinuation of the clinical development of a novel cardiovascular drug. In terms of collaborations, Novartis and Alnylam announced they will work together to explore targeted therapies to restore liver function; Scorpion Therapeutics partnered with AstraZeneca to develop novel cancer treatments and Nutriband Inc. and Kindeva Drug Deliverywill work together to develop a transdermal fentanyl patch. Collaborations were also announced betweenCentury Therapeutics and Bristol Myers Squibb andLillyand Entos Pharmaceuticalsin the areas of stem cell therapies for cancer treatment and neurology, respectively. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyreported progress in developing oral mRNA treatments and West Pharmaceutical Services published a blog describing the development of a proof-of-principle system for a closed-loop feedback system targeting opioid overdose. A report on the BBC website highlighted the benefits of more sustainable inhalers.

Limiting too-big-to-fail: market reactions to policy announcements and actions

Banks considered too-big-to-fail (TBTF) tend to benefit from funding cost advantages as their debt is considered implicitly guaranteed by public authorities, even if the latter have undertaken substantial effort to limit TBTF. This paper focuses on the changes in related market perceptions in response to bank regulatory and resolution reform announcements as well as actual failure resolution actions. It analyses how premia on risky bank debt have reacted to such events, using data for senior and subordinated debt CDS quotes for 45 European banks from January 2007 to May 2020. The empirical results are consistent with progress being made in reducing the value of implicit bank debt guarantees, especially on subordinated bank liabilities. Some earlier bank failure resolution actions appeared to significantly raise risk premia, although more recent failure resolution cases either had no effect on risk premia or moved them in the opposite direction. Several of these events consisted of no-action, that is, in particular, they did not entail any bail-in. As opposed to resolution actions, the reactions of risk premia to policy and regulatory announcements are more difficult to explain and no clear pattern seems to be emerging, confirming the view that action speaks louder than words.

Cross-sectional study of medical advertisements in a national general medical journal: evidence, cost, and safe use of advertised versus comparative drugs

BackgroundHealthcare professionals are exposed to advertisements for prescription drugs in medical journals. Such advertisements may increase prescriptions of new drugs at the expense of older treatments even when they have no added benefits, are more harmful, and are more expensive. The publication of medical advertisements therefore raises ethical questions related to editorial integrity.MethodsWe conducted a descriptive cross-sectional study of all medical advertisements published in the Journal of the Danish Medical Association in 2015. Drugs advertised 6 times or more were compared with older comparators: (1) comparative evidence of added benefit; (2) Defined Daily Dose cost; (3) regulatory safety announcements; and (4) completed and ongoing post-marketing studies 3 years after advertising.ResultsWe found 158 medical advertisements for 35 prescription drugs published in 24 issues during 2015, with a median of 7 advertisements per issue (range 0 to 11). Four drug groups and 5 single drugs were advertised 6 times or more, for a total of 10 indications, and we made 14 comparisons with older treatments. We found: (1) ‘no added benefit’ in 4 (29%) of 14 comparisons, ‘uncertain benefits’ in 7 (50%), and ‘no evidence’ in 3 (21%) comparisons. In no comparison did we find evidence of ‘substantial added benefit’ for the new drug; (2) advertised drugs were 2 to 196 times (median 6) more expensive per Defined Daily Dose; (3) 11 safety announcements for five advertised drugs were issued compared to one announcement for one comparator drug; (4) 20 post-marketing studies (7 completed, 13 ongoing) were requested for the advertised drugs versus 10 studies (4 completed, 6 ongoing) for the comparator drugs, and 7 studies (2 completed, 5 ongoing) assessed both an advertised and a comparator drug at 3 year follow-up.Conclusions and relevanceIn this cross-sectional study of medical advertisements published in the Journal of the Danish Medical Association during 2015, the most advertised drugs did not have documented substantial added benefits over older treatments, whereas they were substantially more expensive. From January 2021, the Journal of the Danish Medical Association no longer publishes medical advertisements.

The Impact of Cryptocurrency Regulation on Trading Markets

ABSTRACT The meteoric growth of global cryptocurrency markets presents novel challenges to regulators. Some policymakers and scholars warn that regulation will cause trading activity to cross borders into less-regulated jurisdictions—or even smother a promising new financial asset class. Others believe regulatory actions will stimulate activity by providing clarity to market participants. Standing behind this disagreement is a debate about the desirability of either outcome. Some believe that governments should promote development of the cryptocurrency sector within their countries, while others view cryptocurrencies as conduits of illegality and fraud that should be restricted through strict regulation or even outright bans. Yet these debates have, to date, been conducted almost entirely without data concerning the effects of regulation on market activity. As a corrective, in this article we assembled original data on cryptocurrency regulations worldwide and used them to empirically examine movement in trading activity at a number of exchanges following key regulatory announcements. We found that a wide variety of models yielded almost entirely null results. From the creation of bespoke licensing regimes to targeted anti-money-laundering and anti-fraud enforcement actions, as well as many other categories of government activities, we found no systemic evidence that regulatory measures cause traders to flee, or enter into, the affected jurisdictions. These findings at last provide an empirical basis for regulatory decisions concerning cryptocurrency trading. Among other things, they call into question that capital flight or chilling effects should be a first-order concern.

Market reaction to trading statements released by Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed companies

Using the event study methodology, this study investigated the market reaction to trading statements released by a sample of the Top 100 Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) listed companies since the inception of the trading statement regulatory requirements in 2010. There appears to be significant information leakages before the release of trading statements. The share prices on the JSE shows a tendency to incorporate more timely sources of information before the release of trading statements. The results show a differential market reaction in the pre-announcement period. For profit warnings, the market seems to have largely impounded the expected poor earnings before the announcement. In the case of profit upgrades, the market appears to be more cautious and requires confirmatory information for a further positive reaction. A post-announcement earnings drift occurs for a period of thirty days after the announcement. This is contrary to the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) which asserts that new information is reflected in share prices almost immediately. This allows investors and portfolio managers with a trading strategy to outperform the market by investing in companies announcing profit upgrades and profit warnings. The observed market inefficiency can be mitigated by managers disseminating the earnings surprise information to a wide range of stakeholders and market participants rather than relying only on the mandatory regulatory announcement.

Does cryptocurrency pricing response to regulatory intervention depend on underlying blockchain architecture?

Blockchain technology appears to be ready to revolutionise a broad number of industries. However, the blockchain itself contains a number of inefficiencies and areas for improvement, namely: transaction fees and transaction speeds. Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) address, and improve on these inefficiencies and a number of digital currencies utilising this technology have already begun to appear. This paper provides an explanation of the technology behind DAG-based assets, while identifying and highlighting strategic advantages that DAGs possess over traditional blockchains. We conduct an EGARCH volatility analysis of a range of blockchain-based and DAG-based cryptocurrencies in the aftermath of a range of market shocks, taking the form of regulatory announcements such as bans and broad restrictions for cryptocurrencies. We find that DAG-based assets become increasingly responsive to market shocks as they mature. Such behaviour mirrors that of established cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, providing evidence that DAG-based cryptocurrencies now share similar characteristics to traditional blockchain-chain based products.

Reflection of Regulatory Announcement in Equity Market: Fresh Insight from Oil & Gas Sector of Pakistan

This study is based on the problem that how regulations made by oil and gas regulatory authority influences the companies in oil and gas sector of Pakistan. We identify 13 regulatory changes in oil and sector of Pakistan which broadly includes the announcement related to the formulation, functions and responsibilities of oil and gas authority, deregulation and changes in the prices of oil and gas products, interference of apex court into the oil and gas sector and privatization of oil refineries in emerging market of Pakistan. Well-liked event study methodology is used to uncover the impact of regulation announcement on equity prices in Pakistan. Beside this, we also capture the effect of regulation announcement on the firm performance by introducing the dummy variable in ordinary least framework. In line with the financial and econometric theory criteria, we use the sales growth, leverage, liquidity and tangibility as control variables. Study reveal that regulatory announcements have statistically significant aggregate effect on the oil and gas sector of Pakistan stock exchange. We recommend to the policy makers, managers and regulators that the stock prices of oil and gas companies are more sensitive toward the regulatory announcements related to interference of Supreme Court and regulations concerning to the formulation, functions and responsibilities of oil and gas regulatory authority in Pakistan.

Food Safety Regulatory Enforcement in China: A Data-Driven Approach

Government regulations have a substantial impact on food safety, both within China and elsewhere in the world. But regulatory research is hampered by a lack of systematic data. Much of the extant regulatory research is based on interpretations of government policy and regulatory announcements. At best, qualitative analysis indicates policy and regulatory intent, not enforcement, and it lacks precision and specificity. Using natural language processing (NLP), this study creates quantitative indicators of food regulatory enforcement by the Chinese government based on the conversion of 28,000 free-form criminal-court case texts. We focus on two main Chinese regulatory agencies, the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) and the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA). Our quantitative analysis reveals substantial differences in the regulatory functions of these two agencies. The CFDA has been far more proactive than the MOA in uncovering food-safety problems — a function we call a “lead function” — whereas the MOA has been mainly involved in providing evidence and data — a function we call a “supporting function.” To our knowledge, this article is the first to quantitatively map the Chinese government’s regulatory functions in the food industry at such a granular level. The policy implications of our findings are drawn from two contextual factors. First, a large number of China’s food-safety problems occur in the upstream sector — the sector over which the MOA exercises regulatory authority. Second, the Chinese government’s regulatory regime has mainly focused on the CFDA rather than the MOA. These findings suggest a pressing need for the MOA to undertake more lead functions.

How do carbon prices react to regulatory announcements in China? A genetic algorithm with overlapping events

To investigate the impacts of regulatory announcements on China’s pilot carbon markets, as well as test the semi-strong form of market efficiency, a multivariate regression model with GARCH effects combined with multiple bilaterally modified dummy variables is established which allows us to investigate the potential overlapping influence from two timely adjacent events. The Shanghai, Guangdong and Hubei pilot carbon markets are taken as case studies. Based on the ADF test and the runs test, the results show that the China’s pilot carbon markets have achieved the weak form of efficiency but not the semi-strong form of efficiency. With the regression model the results show that the release of the allowance allocation plan will affect the carbon price trend, and the allowance auction can only play an auxiliary role as its impact on the carbon price is not decisive. In addition, ubiquitous ex-ante impact proves that the information leakage exists in each pilot carbon market. The model established in this paper is suitable for analyzing the impacts of overlapping events in different markets, which can effectively assist decision makers to distinguish the effects caused by overlapping events.

The Impact of Cryptocurrency Regulation on Trading Markets

The meteoric growth of global cryptocurrency markets presents novel challenges to regulators. Some policymakers and scholars warn that regulation will cause trading activity to cross borders into less-regulated jurisdictions—or even smother a promising new financial asset class. Others believe regulatory actions will stimulate activity by providing clarity to market participants. Standing behind this disagreement is a debate about the desirability of either outcome. Some believe that governments should promote development of the cryptocurrency sector within their countries, while others view cryptocurrencies as conduits of illegality and fraud that should be restricted through strict regulation or even outright bans. Yet these debates have, to date, been conducted almost entirely without data concerning the effects of regulation on market activity. As a corrective, we assemble original data on cryptocurrency regulations worldwide and use them to empirically examine movement in trading activity at a number of exchanges following key regulatory announcements. Our findings are surprising. A wide variety of models yields almost entirely null results. From the creation of bespoke licensing regimes to targeted anti-money-laundering and anti-fraud enforcement actions, as well as many other categories of government activities, we find no systemic evidence that regulatory measures cause traders to flee, or enter into, the affected jurisdictions. These findings at last provide an empirical basis for regulatory decisions concerning cryptocurrency trading. Among other things, they call into question that capital flight or chilling effects should be a first-order concern.

The Effect of IPCC Reports and Regulatory Announcements on the Stock Market

This study explores U.S. public companies’ reactions to scientific announcements by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) with respect to updated climate change knowledge and how it affects their stock valuations, given their carbon emission/environmental outlooks. Based on a sample of total daily returns collected for 10 industry indexes from the S&P 500 Index over the period 1990–2014, and using an event study approach, we analyze the connection between IPCC assessment report announcements and firms’ returns to evaluate panel data models. We found that various sectors, regardless of their carbon profiles, react abnormally to IPCC report announcements without remarkable long-run cumulative effects. The implications of these results are that there is no clear violation of the efficient markets hypothesis, yet short-term profits may be gained. Furthermore, the market still reacts to new scientific announcements, even though 24 years have passed since the first IPCC report. In addition, there is a negative relationship for low and medium carbon-intensive industries, especially in the short term.

Did Comprehensive Assessment (CA) 2014 and Stress Test Exercise (STE) 2016 resolve information asymmetry?

The study investigates the informational value of the Comprehensive Assessment (CA) 2014 and the Stress Test Exercise (STE) 2016 by leveraging the literature on market reactions around scheduled announcements and by analyzing the trading patterns and volume-return co-movements around the announcements. We corroborate the theoretical implications from the literature and find a significant drop in trading for the whole sample before the CA 2014 results announcement illuminating the existence of information asymmetry. The significant rise in trading and volume-return correlations after the CA report indicates the resolution of the information asymmetry. The released information signaled the costs of the new regulatory regime by revealing the critical risk factors for the regulator. We find no characteristic trading patterns around the STE 2016 results announcement due to the specificity of the publication period, however observing only the price reactions, we uncover significant negative market reactions for the banks falling under the Single Supervisor Mechanism (SSM) umbrella suggesting the investors' awareness of the regulatory costs arising from the SSM. The study adds to the academic literature focused mainly on earning announcements by providing evidence for market reactions after regulatory announcements and delivers valuable implications for policymakers.