In the first half of 2000 the authors of this paper visited the twelve District Reserve Banks in the United States which was followed by a discussion at the Board in Washington. The aim of this visit was to get a deeper insight into the working of the American Federal Reserve System in order to...

This Study is based on the 8th SUERF Lecture given by Alexandre Lamfalussy. Professor Lamfalussy has a long association with SUERF since its creation in 1963. In July 2000 the ECOFIN established the Committee of Wise Men on the Regulation of European Securities Markets under the chairmanship of...

The investigation of the sequencing of liberalization in the EU financial services industry is the primary object of this study. The relevance of the EU model for financial liberalization is threefold. First, the EU route towards liberalization in financial services could be regarded as a...

On May 1, 2004, ten countries in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe will become full members of the EU. The parliaments and monetary authorities of the ten accession countries have already to a large extent adapted their legal and institutional structures to the new Europe-wide environment....

This paper studies the incentives to join or enlarge a monetary union under alternative assumptions about the extent of market reform within the union and in candidate countries. Lack of labour mobility, wage/price flexibility or fiscal reform brings costs for both new entrants and in the...

This paper documents the recent performance of European electronic purses. It presents data on 16 such schemes, and compares their penetration and usage rates. These rates are shown to differ substantially. A number of schemes are doing increasingly well and in all probability are here to stay....

This paper brings to the forefront the assumptions that we make when focusing on a particular type of explanation for bank profitability. We evaluate a broad field of research by introducing a general framework for a profit maximizing bank and demonstrate how different types of models can be...

This paper aims at providing a complete picture of banking mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in Europe during the 1990s and at offering economic evaluation and strategic analyses of the process. The main characteristics of this process in the 1990s were the emergence of " mega banks" at the...

We examine whether the European settlement institutions are technically efficient. This is done by means of estimating a translog cost function, and investigating whether scale economies are fully exploited. Since the sample is quite heterogeneous, fixed effects regression is introduced. From...