The paper aims to identify the roots and causes of the failure of existing regional economic integration efforts in the Western Balkans and the poor prospects for similar attempts in the future. Existing classical political and economic approaches are enriched by identifying a framework of...

This paper offers a specific analysis of speculation bubbles in the economic history of the world, and then tries to identify the causes and effects of the speculation bubble on the real estate market in the USA, which was the main cause of the subprime crisis. The first part of the paper aims...

The ongoing globalisation process has not put an end to international financial crises. On the contrary, it seems to have contributed to their appearance and to accentuating their degrees of unpredictability. In this context, the main objective of the present study is to establish whether the...

The goal of this paper is to present an original and simple analysis aimed to understand why investing in capital markets can be very dangerous for "naive investors". Stock markets display often exploding volatility. They are characterized by instability and subject to external shocks. If...

That the United States and the world experienced a major financial crisis and is still struggling to recover comes as no surprise to most. Less well known is the fact that over 400 commercial banks and thrifts have failed in the U.S. since 2008. This paper attempts to understand why so many...

The paper examines whether there is an economic justification for a macroprudential approach to insurance regulation based on the normative theory of regulation. First, the paper elaborates some basic foundations, such as the characterisation of a macroprudential approach to financial regulation...

The present paper measured the efficiency of Islamic banks during economic troubles of 2006-2009 to address the question if Islamic banks were efficient and stable. This paper addresses this question by measuring efficiency through employing the on-parametric technique, Data Envelopment Analysis...

Islamic banking is considered as alternative to conventional banking. It focuses on profit/loss and risk sharing, than interest based deposit/lending followed in conventional banking. Conventional Banking cherishes a long history while Islamic banking gained importance in last few decades. The...

This paper investigates the determinants of banking system fragility by underlining the impact of bank liberalization on banking stability during the process of financial liberalization in emerging and developed countries. To this effect, we adopted a panel model with spatial dependency from a...