Nowadays the organized crime exploits the development of integration and globalization in the industrial, commercial and financial activities, taking advantage of the same networks that facilitate the legitimate transactions. In expanding their businesses the criminal organizations try to use...

In 2005 the European Commission has adopted the so called Third Directive on Anti-Money Laundering (AML), which was to be implemented into the national laws at the latest in December 2007. The key feature that characterizes the Third Directive is the idea that the regulatory framework should be...

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

This paper analyzes recent trends in, and determinants of, financial supervisory governance inside and outside central banks. We first identify similarities and differences between this emerging strand in the literature and the central bank independence literature in order to frame the...

The aim of this article is to offer a simple framework for estimating the benefits and costs of anti-money laundering regulation, based on a prudent estimation of the economic value of the worldwide money laundering. Using the multiplier model of the relationship between criminal markets...

An increasing number of countries show a trend towards a certain degree of consolidation of powers in financial supervision, which has resulted in the establishment of unified regulators, that are different from the national central banks. By contrast a high involvement of the central bank in...

In recent years we have witnessed a deep change in the design of all the institutions that are responsible for supervising banking and financial markets. The financial supervision scenario is going through a deep evolution on all fronts, and many countries have made important changes in the...

This paper claims that the regulation profile of the Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs) respect to the international standards defined to prevent potentially harmful phenomena - such as aggressive taxation, financial instability, money laundering and terrorism finance - depends on their specific...

This paper is focused on the economics of financing banking supervision. Two questions are investigated: What are the most common financing practices? Can we explain differences in current financing practices by country specific factors, using a path dependence approach? Given a sample of 90...

This paper analyses how the central bank's role in the monetary institutional setting can affect the unification process of the overall financial supervision architecture. Using indicators of monetary commitment and central bank independence, we claim that these legal proxies show an inverse...