We compare banking sector development in the EU Accession Countries (AC) Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey with a special emphasis on the role of foreign banks. We discuss selected features of the Accession Countries' banking sector reform and patterns of foreign entry, combining the...

The role of insurance companies, although growing in importance in financial intermediation, has received less attention than bank and stock markets and if so, mainly as a provider of risk transfer in single country or very heterogeneous samples. We investigate both the impact of insurance...

The role of insurance companies, although growing in importance in financial intermediation, has received less attention than bank and stock markets and if so, mainly as a provider of risk transfer in single country or very heterogeneous samples. We investigate both the impact of insurance...

Without doubt a well-developed financial sector is related to efficient resource allocation and growth, but there is modest consensus on the direction of that link, on the notion of what is meant by quot;well developedquot;, on which subset of the financial market is crucial and thus which...

Asian efforts towards bond market development are driven by the 1997-98 financial crises; Central and Eastern European efforts by the transition towards EMU. The small size of most of the economies underlying these still quot;emergingquot; bond markets poses the question of minimum efficient...

This paper examines the relationship between the development of the aggregate bond markets and real GDP in 13 highly developed economies. The recent interest in the ties between the real and the financial sector has usually been on the banking sector and the stock markets, rather ignoring the...

This paper examines for the first time the relationship between the net issue values of aggregate bonds, as well as the different bond sectors separately, and economic growth. The other new feature of this study is the usage of quarterly data. Granger causalities are calculated for time series...