Since the beginning of the 1990s, it has been widely expected that the implementation of the European Single Market would lead to a rapid convergence of Europe’s financial systems. In the present paper we will show that at least in the period prior to the introduction of the common currency...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the alledged transformation of the financial systems in the three major European economies, France, Germany and the UK. Based on a unified data set developed on the basis of national accounts statistics, and employing a new and consistent method of...

The German corporate governance system has long been cited as the standard example of an insider-controlled and stakeholder-oriented system. We argue that despite important reforms and substantial changes of individual elements of the German corporate governance system the main characteristics...

Until the end of the last decade, German banking and corporate governance and the financial system as a whole were characterized by a remarkable degree of stability. The most important characteristics of the German financial system were bank dominance of the entire financial sector, a strong...

This paper is one of the two introductory chapters of the book The German Financial System. It first discusses two issues that have a general bearing on the entire book, and then provides a broad overview of the German financial system. The first general issue is that of clarifying what we mean...

At present, the question of how national pension or retirement payment systems should be organised is being hotly debated in various countries, and opinions vary widely as to what should be regarded as the optimal design for such systems. It appears to the authors of the present paper that in...

We investigate the connection between corporate governance system configurations and the role of intermediaries in the respective systems from a informational perspective. Building on the economics of information we show that it is meaningful to distinguish between internalisation and...