Bank profitability in the USA was extremely high in the pre-crisis period, yet this did not prevent the current crisis. It has become clear that these profits were on shaky grounds and also that bank profits were not used to buttress banks' capital bases. This paper analyses the effects of...

The analysis highlights the aspects of diversified market structures and of local, low-distance banking as advantageous for financial stability. Heterogeneity protects from uniform market behaviour. Local banking can better overcome the problem of asymmetric information, particular in SME...

This paper examines whether Asian banks are still prone to moral hazard in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian crisis. Using a sample of commercial banks from 12 Asian countries during the 2001-2007 period,our empirical findings highlight that greater market power in the banking market results in...

Within the banking efficiency analysis literature there is a dearth of studies which have considered how banks have 'survived' the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Considering the profound changes that have occurred in the region's financial systems since then, such an analysis is both...

This paper is the first research attempt that investigates the impact of a large number of corporate governance mechanisms on the performance of Greek banks, employing widely accepted in the literature of corporate governance econometric models. Results indicate that system GMM models are more...

The recent financial crisis has heightened the research interest worldwide in the relationship between various corporate governance (CG) mechanisms and firm performance. Nevertheless, few published papers focus on investigating this nexus for the case of the banking industry. This study is the...

This paper proposes a framework for deriving early-warning models with optimal out-of-sample forecasting properties and applies it to predicting distress in European banks. The main contributions of the paper are threefold. First, the paper introduces a conceptual framework to guide the process...

On May 11-12, 2011, SUERF, the Belgian Financial Forum, the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) jointly organised the 29th SUERF Colloquium New paradigms in money and finance? The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the...

Governments often attempt to increase the confidence of financial market participants by making implicit or explicit guarantees of uncertain credibility. Confidence in these guarantees presumably alters the size of the financial sector, but observing the long-run consequences of failed...