1. The best overall comparative political economy treatments of regulatory systems in general, and financial systems in particular, are John Zysman’s classic Governments, Markets, and Growth: Financial Systems and the Politics of Industrial Change (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983);
2. Steven K. Vogel’s Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996);
3. and Henry Laurence’s Money Rules: The New Politics of Finance in Britain and Japan (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001). More recently, however, Susanne Lütz’s comparative study of the United States, Britain, and Germany is the definitive comparative work (although it doesn’t include Japan): ‘Convergence Within National Diversity: The Regulatory State in Finance’, Journal of Public Policy 24(2) (August 2004), 169–19.
4. On the United States, see the author’s ‘Money and Power: The American Financial System from Free Banking to Global Competition’, in Grahame Thompson (ed.), Markets, vol. 2 of The United States in the Twentieth Century (London: Hodder and Stoughton for the Open University, 2nd edition, 2000) pp. 169–207, and Helen A. Garten, US Financial Regulation and the Level Playing Field (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
5. On Japan, see the authoritative works of Richard Katz: Japan, The System That Soured: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Miracle (Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); and its sequel, Japanese Phoenix: The Long Road to Economic Revival (M.E. Sharpe, 2003), as well as the author’s ‘Governance, Globalization and the Japanese Financial System: Resistance or Restructuring?’, in Glenn Hook (ed.), Contested Governance in Japan (London: Routledge, 2005).