The systemic risk potential in the European banking market has increased. Hence, the following questions emerge: Is there a need for a truly European supervisory framework? And, how should a potential European supervisor be organised? This paper evaluates the existing supervisory framework as...

A rational financial constitution of the EU should be able to fulfil redistributive objectives at minimum costs. The present financial system of the Community is not compatible with this requirement. After the decisions of the European Council in Berlin on the Agenda 2000 the fundamental flaw of...

With the introduction of the Euro, a single European money market has emerged. Further wholesale financial markets are considered to be highly integrated within the European Union. However, integration in retail financial markets is less advanced. For measuring financial market integration this...

This paper discusses the incentive conflicts that arise in banking supervision in the EU in a principal-agent framework, where the regulator is the agent and the taxpayers is the principal. The regulatory agent in addition to maintaining financial stability (the objective of the principal) may...

Drawing on recent work on the creation and breakup of countries, this paper examines the impact of economic and political integration on the vertical government structure. It argues that by increasing the market size and the benefits from the decentralized provision of public goods, integration...

The internet revolution is said to foster integration of the market for financial services, since consumers are able to shop around at all companies worldwide and firms can easily offer their services on the internet at a minimum of distribution cost. However, the European market for online...

Regional transfers are assumed to have an impact on the public opinion towards the benefactor, but empirical evidence is still scarce. In this paper we test this hypothesis for the structural funds of the European Union (EU) by combining detailed data on regional transfers with public opinion...

We investigate the impact of cartel breakdowns on merger activity. Merging information on cartel cases decided by the European Commission (EC) between 2000 and 2011 with a detailed data set of worldwide merger activity, we find that, first, the average number of all merger transactions increase...

We empirically investigate the determinants of self-reporting under the European corporate leniency program. Applying a data set consisting of 442 firm groups that participated in 76 cartels decided by the European Commission between 2000 and 2011, we find that the probability of a firm becoming...

We provide an empirical assessment of EC cartel enforcement decisions between 2000 and 2011. Following an initial characterisation of our dataset, we especially investigate the determinants of the duration of cartel investigations. We are able to identify several key drivers of investigation...