World Class Faculty & Research / January 22, 2014

Do Wall Street Regulators Listen to the Public?

Shawn Mankad, assistant professor of business analytics in Smith's Decision, Operations & Information Technologies department has co-developed a formula, “RegRank,” which gauges how effectively federal regulators incorporate public feedback.

The tool, powered by computer algorithms, is detailed in a paper Mankade co-authored with MIT Sloan professor and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) former chief economist Andrei Kirilenko and University of Michigan professor George Michailidis.

RegRank measures regulatory sentiment and tests the impact of the public comment process on rulemaking. The tool could be useful to such regulators as the CFTC and SEC, as both have faced legal challenges to rules on grounds they failed to properly incorporate public feedback.

Through testing RegRank, Mankad and his colleagues found the CFTC did adjust final rules related to Dodd-Frank legislation in response to public comments.

Read Reuter's coverage of Mankad's work.

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