How do we prevent financial institutions from taking excessive risk when the public fisc serves as their ultimate creditor? This is one of the central questions left over after the recent financial crisis and, for the past five years, there has been no shortage of proposed answers. Two of the...

Starting from the observation that at the multilateral level shareholder activism is considered as an important aspect of good corporate governance, this paper examines several legal and economic obstacles to institutional investor activism in the EU and in the US. We find that investors in the...

There has recently been considerable interest in the potential adverse effects associated with excessive uncertainty in energy futures markets. Theoretical models of investment under uncertainty predict that increased uncertainty will tend to induce firms to delay production and investment....

This study examines whether mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) leads to capital market benefits through enhanced financial statement comparability. UK domestic standards are considered very similar to IFRS (Bae et al. 2008), suggesting any capital market...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, it has been widely expected that the implementation of the European Single Market would lead to a rapid convergence of Europe’s financial systems. In the present paper we will show that at least in the period prior to the introduction of the common currency...

Initiated by the seminal work of Diamond/Dybvig (1983) and Diamond (1984), advances in the theory of financial intermediation have sharpened our understanding of the theoretical foundations of banks as special financial institutions. What makes them unique is the combination of accepting...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the alledged transformation of the financial systems in the three major European economies, France, Germany and the UK. Based on a unified data set developed on the basis of national accounts statistics, and employing a new and consistent method of...

The United States has over 115 different state and federal government agencies regulating financial services, which encompasses banking, securities and insurance firms and products. Various commentators have noted that at least part of the blame for the financial crisis of 2007-2009 in the...

This paper investigates whether the reputation of the Nominated Advisor (Nomad) impacts accrual and real earnings management of Initial Public Offering (IPO) firms on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange in the UK. While role of Nomads on AIM market is a...

We analyze the partisanship of Securities and Exchange Commissioners (SEC) and members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (Fed) using the language-based approach of Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Taddy (Econometrica, 2019). The level of partisanship among these regulators is greater than that of...