On October 24, 2003, SUERF celebrated its 40th anniversary in the Galerie Dorée of the Banque de France with an especially high level and rich seminar. The memorable occasion was further elevated by Jean Claude Trichet giving the tenth SUERF Annual Lecture in his last public speech as Governor...

This paper studies the incentives to join or enlarge a monetary union under alternative assumptions about the extent of market reform within the union and in candidate countries. Lack of labour mobility, wage/price flexibility or fiscal reform brings costs for both new entrants and in the...

This paper documents the recent performance of European electronic purses. It presents data on 16 such schemes, and compares their penetration and usage rates. These rates are shown to differ substantially. A number of schemes are doing increasingly well and in all probability are here to stay....

This paper brings to the forefront the assumptions that we make when focusing on a particular type of explanation for bank profitability. We evaluate a broad field of research by introducing a general framework for a profit maximizing bank and demonstrate how different types of models can be...

This paper aims at providing a complete picture of banking mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in Europe during the 1990s and at offering economic evaluation and strategic analyses of the process. The main characteristics of this process in the 1990s were the emergence of " mega banks" at the...

We examine whether the European settlement institutions are technically efficient. This is done by means of estimating a translog cost function, and investigating whether scale economies are fully exploited. Since the sample is quite heterogeneous, fixed effects regression is introduced. From...

There has recently been increased research and policy interest in the divergent macroeconomic performance in the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Understanding the underlying factors of macroeconomic differentials, the source and transmission of shocks and the adjustment process in...

On 11-12 November 2008, SUERF and Banque Centrale du Luxembourg organized a conference on Productivity in the Financial Services Sector on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Banque Centrale du Luxembourg. The conference addressed three main themes: first, stylized facts on banks'...

In Europe, the balance between publicly owned and privately owned financialinstitutions varies through time and from country to country. Historically, nationalisations and privatisations have moved the balance backwards and forwards. So has the recent financial crisis. Mathias Schmit, Laurent...