European Union (EU) countries offer a unique experience of financial regulatory and supervisory integration, complementing various other European integration efforts following the Second World War. Financial regulatory and supervisory integration was a very slow process before 2008, despite...

The European Union's financial supervisory architecture is based on a sectoral model with separate authorities for banking, insurance and securities and markets. New developments in the EU financial sector make this sectoral structure increasingly out of date: •Brexit creates a need for...

Integrated capital markets facilitate risk sharing across countries. Lower home bias in financial investments is an indicator of risk sharing. We highlight that existing indicators of equity home bias in the literature suffer from incomplete coverage because they consider only listed equities....

Nicolas Véron responds to the UK Financial Reporting Council's Discussion paper on choice in the UK audit market.

In this paper, presented to the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, Nicolas Véron discusses whether the EU should adopt the controversial IFRS 8 standard, a convergence project on how companies should report the performance of their individual business segments....

Nicolas Véron responds to a consultation by the UK Financial Reporting Council and makes recommendations on how to address the audit market problem' resulting from the presence of only four international audit networks. Eventhough serious problems would be created by the disappearance of one of...

This paper discusses the creation of a European Banking Union. First, we discuss questions of design. We highlight seven fundamental choices that decision makers will need to make: Which EU countries should participate in the banking union? To which categories of banks should it apply? Which...

Europe's banking system has been in a state of systemic fragility since 2007-08. The current phase is marked by a sequence of interactions between sovereign problems and banking problems, resulting in gradual contagion to more countriesand more asset classes. The banking and sovereign crises are...

Public authorities overseeing the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation, through the Monitoring Board in place since early 2009, should encourage the Foundation to make itself more directly accountable to the global investment community. The Monitoring Board should...

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) have not consistently met the expectations placed on them by investors and policymakers. It is difficult, however, to improve the quality of ratings through regulatory initiatives. In the short term, changes to the CRAs' regulatory environment, in a context of high...