Preface – by Chrysovalantis Gaganis, Fotios Pasiouras, Menelaos Tasiou, Constantin Zopounidis -- Chapter 1 – The changing role of banks in the financial system: social versus conventional banks, by Simon Cornée, Anastasia Cozarenco, Ariane Szafarz -- Chapter2 – ESG issues as strategic...

This paper investigates the relationship between the effective tax rate on bank income and bank profit efficiency. Our sample consists of 3,472 observations from 533 publicly quoted commercial banks operating in 46 countries between 2001 and 2009. We estimate a global frontier while controlling...

This study investigates whether the capital market values the efficiency of firms. After tracing stock returns and efficiency changes of 399 listed insurance firms in 52 countries during the 2002-2008 period, the paper reports a positive and statistically significant relationship between profit...

This paper provides the first cross-country study on the impact of regulations on the soundness of insurance firms, using data on over 1,700 insurance firms operating in 46 countries. We find that the power of the supervisory authorities and regulations related to technical provisions have an...

This paper investigates the role of technical reserves in the income smoothing behavior of insurance companies. This is one of the first attempts in the literature to trace such relationship in the insurance industry, especially at a multi-country setting. The experience of 770 insurance firms...