The Basel Accord - now commonly referred to as "Basel I" - has exerted a profound influence on international financial politics and domestic prudential financial sector regulatory policy yet great controversy has always surrounded the Accord's impact on the safety and competitiveness of the world's largest financial institutions and the evolution of trans-national regulatory convergence.The author provides a comprehensive examination of the impact of the 1988 Basel Accord on the capital adequacy regulations of developed economies. The study seeks to understand if the Accord affected broad or isolated convergence of 18 developed states' bank credit risk regulations from 1988 to 2000, and also to understand what political economic variables influenced levels of regulatory isomorphism. Quillin creates a quantitative database of developed states' interpretations of the Basel rules which shows that some persistent distinction remained in the way states implemented the Accord. He also explores why convergence emerged among a subset of states, yet not others, by testing a battery of political economic explanations.
                 
            
            
            
            
                
                    List of figures   
  List of tables   
1  Introduction  1 
Pt. I  Historical and theoretical perspectives on the 1988 Basel Accord  9 
2  The political economy of the negotiation of the 1988 Basel Accord as a soft law agreement  11 
3  Theorizing degrees of compliance with the Basel Accord  28 
Pt. II  Quantitative studies  47 
4  Measuring implementation and explanatory variables  49 
5  Explaining implementation-quantitative tests  74 
Pt. III  Case studies  93 
6  Implementation of the Basel Accord in the United States  101 
7  Implementation of the Basel Accord in Europe: the case of France and Germany  123 
8  Implementation of the Basel Accord in Japan  145 
9  Conclusions and extensions  165 
  Notes  179 
  Bibliography  191 
  Index