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 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...

The level of default in financial institutions is a key piece of information in the activity of these organizations and reveals their level of risk. This in turn explains the growing attention given to variables of this kind, during the crisis of these last years. This paper presents a method to...

Banks operating in a regulated environment need to operate within the fiscal, monetary, political and legal regulations; customer tastes, habits and demand; and input supply changes. Changes in these require adjustments in the bank’s operations. Coping with these require finance and instant...

The literature wisdom shows that both theoretical and empirical studies provide contradictory predictions about the relationship between market concentration or competiveness and financial stability in the banking system. In the past two decades, the structure of banking industry of many...

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...