The new regulatory framework imposes an increase in capital requirements for banks. Although core capital (equity) is more expensive than other liabilities (debt), it strengthens banks' stability and improves its loss-absorbing capacity. In this paper, we investigate the link between...

Islamic finance is based on ethical principles in line with Islamic religious law. Despite its low share of the global financial market, Islamic finance has been one of this sector's fastest growing components over the last decades and has gained further momentum in the wake of the financial...

Corporate governance of banks and other financial institutions differs considerably from general corporate governance. For financial institutions the scope of corporate governance goes beyond the shareholders (equity governance) to include debtholders, insurance policy holders and other...

In the post-financial crisis regulatory reforms emphasis has been placed on creating recovery and resolution frameworks for banks, which ensure that the costs of failure are primarily born by shareholders, instead of taxpayers and the wider economy. Supervisors have (or will have) extensive...

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 essay, based on the author's presentation last September to the annual meeting of the North American Securities Administration Association (NASAA), addresses several issues related to Rule 506, the most widely-used of the SEC's transactional exemptions from federal registration of...

We augment a standard monetary DSGE model to include a banking sector and financial markets. We fit the model to Euro Area and US data. We find that agency problems in financial contracts, liquidity constraints facing banks and shocks that alter the perception of market risk and hit financial...

This paper complements the existing scarce literature on financial cooperatives in various ways. First, we describe the background and evolution of European Cooperative Banking Groups (ECBGs). Second, we summarize the main reasons for the past disregard and recent revaluation of the cooperative...

We augment a standard monetary DSGE model to include a banking sector and financial markets. We fit the model to Euro Area and US data. We find that agency problems in financial contracts, liquidity constraints facing banks and shocks that alter the perception of market risk and hit financial...