Recent years have seen great strides in the deepening of our understanding of how sustainability factors – in particular those related to environment, society and governance (ESG) – may act as drivers of financial risks, and therefore are of relevance to institutions responsible for...

The quite recent (2007-2009) global financial crisis (GFC), which was caused by a mix of business, regulatory, supervisory, and macroeconomic (in terms of sub-optimal fiscal and/or monetary policies) failures, had a negative impact both on the financial system – with the failure, through the...

After summarizing the broad lines of the new Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) for credit institutions in the European Union, the author deals in his contribution with some specific issues that have generated controversy, such as the criteria to select the credit institutions supervised by the...

The current crisis has swept aside not only the US investment banks with the best reputation but also the consensual perception of banking risks, contagion and its implication for banking regulation. As everyone agrees now, risks where mispriced, they accumulated in neuralgic points of the...

Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...

This paper studies how financial intermediation varies across banks. Bank size is a first-order determinant of banks' capital structure in the cross-section. Largest banks have the lowest capital-to-asset ratio and the lowest ratio of Tier-1 capital against risk-weighted assets. These large...

The present paper contains a brief presentation and analysis, in a historical perspective through the lens of the recent major crises, of the legal framework governing the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), as well as current developments and challenges ahead. It is structured in three...

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of the power of the ECB to impose administrative penalties as a supervisory authority within the context of the ‘Single Supervisory Mechanism', which is a major building block of the European Banking Union. It is structured in three (3) sections....

The agreement on the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) is an important step to create an integrated banking system in Europe. In this article we look at the powers attributed to the ECB, from a legal perspective, in order to evaluate the SSM in the broader European architecture of banking...