Can Soft Regulation Prevent Financial Crises?: The Dutch Central Bank's Supervision of Behavior and Culture

There is a growing body of opinion that what the financial world needs is a way to identify those pathological risk- takers in advance and, perhaps more importantly, to make sure that the financial institutions that employ them discover and control them. Such an approach to financial governance might be characterized as "soft" supervision: rather than relying on prescribing, proscribing, and
punishing specific actions, it would focus on education and persuasion (still backed up by the threat of sanctions) to encourage financial
institutions to head off excessive risk-taking before it occurs.
In this Article, we report on an in-depth study of the first major effort to put this theory into practice: De Nederlansche Bank's (DNB; the central bank of the Netherlands) novel initiative to promote a healthy corporate culture in the large banks that it supervises.