Preface – by Chrysovalantis Gaganis, Fotios Pasiouras, Menelaos Tasiou, Constantin Zopounidis -- Chapter 1 – The changing role of banks in the financial system: social versus conventional banks, by Simon Cornée, Anastasia Cozarenco, Ariane Szafarz -- Chapter2 – ESG issues as strategic...

This study investigates whether the capital market values the efficiency of firms. After tracing stock returns and efficiency changes of 399 listed insurance firms in 52 countries during the 2002–2008 period, the paper reports a positive and statistically significant relationship between...

In this study, we empirically investigate the relationship between financial and auditing requirements, capital requirements, official supervisory power, and the likelihood of receiving a qualified audit opinion. The sample consists of 71 qualified financial statements and 17,526 unqualified...

This paper provides the first cross-country study on the association between firms' soundness and regulatory policies in the insurance industry. Measuring solvency with an accounting based measure of distance to default, namely the Z-score, we find that the power of the supervisory authorities,...

There exists a lively debate as for the appropriate architecture of the financial supervision regime, with a long list of theoretical advantages and disadvantages associated with each one of its key dimensions. The present study investigates whether and how bank profit efficiency is influenced...