The idea of microfinance is well known now around the world. It can develop both in poor countries and in highly developed ones. Microfinance aims to reach two basic goals: to stimulate the borrowers in order to trigger activities that would generate income and to reach social objectives which...

The study examines the efficiency differences across the ownership structure of Indian microfinance institutions (MFIs) operating during the year 2005/06 to 2017/18 in response to regulatory reforms initiated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in the year 2011. We remove the outliers from the...

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the determinants of risk-taking in the context of Islamic and conventional microfinance institutions (MFIs) while considering the capital structure's role in moderating the risk-taking decisions' effect on financial performance. Fixed and Random...

We measure systemic risk in the network of financial market infrastructures (FMIs) as the probability that two or more FMIs have a large credit risk exposure to the same FMI participant. We construct indicators of credit risk exposures in three main Canadian FMIs during the period 2007-11 and...

This paper examines the quality of credit ratings assigned to banks in Europe and the United States by the three largest rating agencies over the past two decades. We interpret credit ratings as relative assessments of creditworthiness, and define a new ordinal metric of rating error based on...

This paper studies a banking model of maturity transformation in which regulatory arbitrage induces the coexistence of regulated commercial banks and unregulated shadow banks. We derive three main results: First, the relative size of the shadow banking sector determines the stability of the...

The paper provides an overview of the hedge fund industry, mainly from a financial stability and European angle. It is primarily based on an extensive analysis of information from the TASS database. On the positive side of the financial stability assessment, hedge funds have a role as providers...

Over the last decade, information technology has contributed significantly to the evolution of financial markets, without, however, revolutionising the way in which financial institutions interact with one another. This may be about to change, as some market players are now predicting that new...

In this paper we provide evidence that the post-issue accounting profitability of firms underwritten by bank affiliated underwriters that are also borrowers from the same bank in the IPO (Initial Public Offerings) year is significantly better than average, but that the stock price performance of...

A common practice of banks has been to pool assets of different qualities and then sell a fraction of the newly created portfolios to investors. We extend the signaling model for single sales of risky assets to portfolio sales. We identify conditions under which signaling at the portfolio level...