This book offers the first systematic discussion of a new and promising field: the economics of independence, accountability and governance of financial supervision institutions.

This paper analyzes recent trends in, and determinants of, financial supervisory governance inside and outside central banks. We first review the case for supervisory independence and accountability in order to frame the econometric work on their determinants. We then calculate the levels of...

Almost all the literature on the evolution of the financial supervision architecture stresses the importance of financial market characteristics in determining the recent trend toward more unification. But in the real world it is not always clear to what extent market features matter. We present...

In the context of the proposed EU financial supervisory reforms, this paper focuses on the governance of the network of national supervisory banking agencies and the newly established Community supervisor (European Banking Authority, EBA). We assess to what extent lack of governance convergence...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review current trends in reforms of the supervisory architecture in European Union (EU) countries. Design/methodology/approach – Against the background of the debate on the advisability of further centralizing prudential supervision in the EU this...

We examine the relationship between the South African Rand and the gold price volatility using monthly data for the period 1979–2010. Our main finding is that prior to capital account liberalization the causality runs from the South African Rand to the gold price volatility but the causality...