Reform of financial regulation is a priority on the international agenda. At the call of the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G-20), a number of new international standards have been issued, most notably Basel III. As a member of the G-20, the Financial Stability...

This paper surveys studies of the importance of Central Asian small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in the economy and their experience during the Russian financial crisis. It also uses survey data from the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's Business...

After analyzing the different reasons why the financial system and also the regulatory framework induced procyclicality, this paper reviews the experiences of three countries which have introduced dynamic provisioning as a regulatory tool to limit procyclicality. The case of Spain - the country...

Lax monetary policy in the United States has been pointed out as one of the responsible factors behind the recent global crisis. Similar loose monetary conditions also prevailed in many European countries before the crisis and were argued to be among the accommodating factors behind the run-up...

This paper argues that the pass-through in Brazil has fallen compared with estimates in other studies on earlier time periods, and remains low. Whereas pass-through effects where high and close to 1 in the high-inflation period, they seem to have fallen to around 0.2 after the Real Plan...

German Abstract: ZusammenfassungDer vorliegende Forschungsbericht untersucht das Dekarbonisierungspotenzial von Anlageportfolios deutscher Pensionskassen im Kontext des Klimawandels und zeigt ein konzeptionelles Vorgehen auf, um das tatsächliche Potenzial zu messen. Anhand des Klimawandel und...

This paper provides an account of the history of Deutsche Bank in the style of a narrative. Since more than 120 years, Deutsche Bank has been the most important German bank. Its history has been shaped by crises and efforts to overcome them. Moreover, throughout its history, the development of...

This paper investigates the prevailing financial regulatory structures and impact of the current financial turmoil on banking performance in four Asian economies: the People's Republic of China (PRC); Hong Kong, China; Singapore; and Taipei,China. Both the PRC and Hong Kong, China operate under a...

The choice of Microfinance (MF) by the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) as the primary means of poverty alleviation should have brought clarity to the role and functioning of MF, but instead it seems to have generated a fog. It is desirable to take a fresh look and start from first principles...