At present West European banks are increasingly branching out into asset management as well as the consulting business, which cannot be directly influenced by monetary controls. We have therefore carried out a regression analysis and a factor analysis of banks' balance-sheet items, and we have...

The goal of this study is to identify empirically how country-level development, taking into account the financial and macroeconomic environment, affect the risk profiles of the banking sector in Europe. Through a dataset that covers 3,399 European banks spanning the period 1996-2011, and the...

The European Union made a number of steps not least of them the introduction of a common currency to foster the integration of the European financial markets. A number of papers have tried to gauge the degree of integration for various financial markets looking at the convergence of interest...

Central bank communication has changed dramatically over the past decade, with some central banks providing guidance about or explicit forecasts of likely future policy rates. One frequently made argument against the provision by central banks of such guidance or forecasts is that it runs the...