We document the development of the major international banks since the late 1990s, analyzing balance-sheet data for 27 large and complex financial institutions. We argue that the balance-sheet expansion and business line diversification have paved the way for the rise of the universal banking...

This paper builds a unifying framework based on the theory of intertemporal consumption choices that brings together the limited participation-based explanation of the Consumption Capital Asset Pricing Model's poor empirical performance and the transaction costs‐based explanation of incomplete...