For emerging market regulators, shadow banking represents an activity which they must control. For businessmen in economies like Russia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Mexico, shadow banking represents an important business opportunity. By extending credit to risky (but promising) activities...

Developments in information technology are fundamentally changing many traditional business models. Progress in the IT area is bringing about one change in particular: it is reducing search costs and allowing buyers and sellers of products and services to find each other directly on web-based...

Basically, shadow banking is an original kind of business organization, or better a set of institutions and markets, finalized to disinvest fixed assets and convey them to the financial markets. Nowadays, tackling the subject means penetrating the hard core of financialization. Shadow banking...

This report offers an integrated assessment of the shift within non-bank financial intermediation in real estate finance from structured products to leveraged institutions and collective investment vehicles. The paper reviews the key trends in real estate finance since the global financial...

Insurance intermediaries have a key role in the efficient functioning of insurance markets, and minimising information asymmetries and risk of adverse selection is an important consideration. Intermediaries can analyse the needs of insurance consumers, and advise on appropriate solutions and...

We present a model in which banks and other financial intermediaries face both occasionally binding borrowing constraints, and costs of equity issuance. Near the steady state, these intermediaries can raise equity finance at no cost through retained earnings. However, even moderately large...

Strategies and structure of financial institutions -- Regulatory environment of financial institutions -- Risks inherent in financial institutions -- Money markets, bond markets and mortgage markets -- Stock markets, derivative markets and foreign exchange markets -- Strategies of depository...

This paper analyzes banks choice between lending to firms individually and sharing lending with other banks, when firms and banks are subject to moral hazard and monitoring is essential. Multiple-bank lending is optimal whenever the benefit of greater diversification in terms of higher...