ABSTRACT
The global financial crisis that began in 2007 is a once-in-a-lifetime event with wide-ranging consequences for government policy-making. The crisis has prompted much soul-searching among economists and financial experts who failed to anticipate it, or whose warnings were not taken seriously by regulators and investors. Scholars of international political economy (IPE), however, are generally not in the business of predicting financial crises or recessions, and so the field is unlikely to see the crisis as a manifestation of scholarly failure. Yet the crisis may have an appreciable impact on the trajectory of IPE, just as the downfall of the Soviet Union shaped subsequent scholarship on international relations and great-power conflict and prompted a movement away from grand, and toward mid-range, theories. We discuss three categories of inquiry – or puzzles within the realm of global finance – that have received relatively little attention within the field of IPE, but which should receive greater scrutiny as a result of the crisis: the determinants of cross-national variation in financial regulation; patterns of cooperation and discord within global regulatory bodies and the involvement of emerging-market countries in these bodies; and the interplay between individual firms-as-political-actors and public policy outcomes.
