The paper focuses on the profitability of the consumer credit industry in Europe. Using consumer credit companies’ financial statement data, we investigate the effect of firm-specific and market-specific factors on the profitability of a sample of French, German, Italian and Spanish consumer...

Banking privatisation represents one of the major forces which are significantly changing the banking sector in Europe. Studying the process of banking privatisation thus helps to understand the dynamics of the sector. This book analyses - from the perspective of both commercial banking and...

The postal systems in Europe, as well as in other industrialised and non industrialised countries, are currently undergoing radical changes in their institutional set-up, competitive behaviors, productive and distributive processes, range of services offered. The study of these changes and of...

The purpose of this paper is to provide new empirical evidence on the determinants of economic performances in the insurance industry. To this end, we test the impact of several firm characteristics, such as dimension, capital structure and investment policies on economic performance for a panel...

The paper examines the performance of European VC backed firms operating in the life science and ICT industries at IPO and in the long run. Empirical evidence shows a lower underpricing for VC backed companies and lower volatility of returns in the first days and first weeks of trading,...

This paper develops an analysis of the determinants of leverage in European listed companies in the last decade. To test the impact of firm characteristics on the capital structure, we use panel data of companies located in 7 countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland,...

This study evaluates the underpricing of the European companies operating in the life science industries at IPO. Results show a positive and high underpricing for the IPOs occurred between 2002 and 2007. Moreover, when differentiating between VC backed and non VC backed firms, we find that the...

The book is devoted to a subject which deserves growing attention from policy makers, financial operators and academics. It is the issue of unbanking or underbanking in developed countries. With respect to this, the goal of the authors has been to devote more efforts to understanding the problem...

The paper analyses the demand of remittance services within a framework that considers a wider range of migrants’ financial needs and how this demand evolves along the life cycle and in relation to the immigration project. It also studies the key issues of the regulation both at international...