Governance at banks, especially major banks, requires further reform, especially with respect to incentives. Supervisors are concerned that incentives may make executives prone to take “excessive” risks. Shareholders are concerned that banks rarely earn their cost of capital.What's needed is...

Full paper published in Journal of Financial Crime, vol 8, no 2, 150-155 (November 2000)The obligation of a bank as a matter of contract with its customer to honor its duty of secrecy over the information it holds presents a barrier to an efficient, competitive and informed securities market....

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

This paper finds evidence that regulatory forbearance toward weakly capitalized banks, which creates “zombie” banks, leads to the creation of “zombie” firms in the Japanese banking crisis of 1997-2003. Capital weak banks bankrupt large borrowers at higher levels of indebtedness than...

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 has demonstrated the fragility of prevailing corporate governance ideas and the weakness of legal means of minimizing risk and highlighting dangers in major banking corporations. Gatekeeper failure has undoubtedly been a significant contributor to this...

This empirical paper investigates the path to the resolution of financial distress for a sample of small and medium French firms in default, in particular on the decision between bankruptcy and informal (out-of-court) negotiations. The procedure is depicted as a sequential game in which...

This paper investigates the determinants of the arbitration taking place after a corporate defaults. Two ways of resolving financial distress are conceivable: either the creditors privately renegotiate with the debtor, or a formal bankruptcy procedure is triggered. This arbitration depends on...