The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exacerbated its severity. In this paper, we...

The assessment of businesses' credit risk is a difficult and important process in the area of financial risk management. In a classical multivariate model, financial ratios are combined in order to achieve a credit risk score, which signals if a loan application is approved or discarded. Despite...

Motivated by the variety of bank risk proxies, our analysis reveals that nonperforming assets are a well-suited complement to the Z-score in studies of bank risk.

China’s rampant environmental pollution problems and rising greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting climate change are undermining its long-term economic growth. China, from its own perspective cannot afford to and, from an international perspective, is not meant to continue on the...

The paper reviews and assesses our understanding of the notion of 'market discipline' in corporate governance. It questions the wholesale appeal to this notion in policy discussion, which fails to provide an account of the underlying mechanisms in terms of theory and empirical analysis....

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between individual trust in financial institutions and individual access to these institutions. Based on a large-scale survey of savings patterns of Indians, we find that individuals reporting that they do not have access to certain financial...

Additionally to the financial crisis causing a world recession, Liechtenstein's financial sector has been challenged by the so-called Zumwinkel-Affair when a whistle-blower sold data of hundreds of tax evaders to international tax authorities. This paper investigates the impact of this affair,...

We describe a dynamic model of financial intermediation in which fundamental characteristics of the economy imply a unique equilibrium path of bank and financial market lending. Yet we also show that economies whose fundamental characteristics have converged may continue to have very different...

This paper reviews the literature on the finance-growth nexus within a neoclassical growth framework, placing an emphasis on the policy implications in the current European environment, that has placed financial reforms high on the policy Agenda. While more research is needed to establish...