There remains considerable confusion as to how exactly the MiFID and UCITS directives will interact in the long run. This uncertainty reflects the growing pains of a regulatory transformation that represents no less than a tectonic shift from intense and prescriptive product regulation to a more...

The EU financial services industry has experienced an enormous regulatory adaptation over the past decade. The dust that had been thrown up by the 1992 programme had barely settled when a new regulatory programme was announced covering 42 measures that had to be implemented by 2005. Exchange...

Now that the worst of the financial storm is over, regulators are setting new strategies to deal with the systemic importance of the €427 trillion ($604 trillion) over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market. This paper explores the three major sources of disruptive effects in OTC derivatives:...

Starting in January 2005, all companies located in the European Union (EU) have to use the accounting standards promulgated by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). At a stroke, accounting standards for the consolidated accounts of companies whose shares are listed on an EU stock...

Non-equity financial markets used to be ‘hidden’ in Europe, in the sense that relative to their size, they traditionally received less attention from ordinary investors and the media than equity markets. This phenomenon was accentuated by the fact that the Financial Services Action Plan was...

Based on a sample of 15 European countries, this survey analyses various features of the European IPO (Initial Public Offering) market over the period from 1995 to 2004: listing requirements, IPO-mechanism choices, performance and secondary market liquidity. First, the comparison of national...

The key concept underlying the Basel II framework for risk measurement and corresponding equity capital standards is that the existing regulations pertaining to credit risk will be individualised through reference to the internal ratings of banks. In accordance with the regulatory guidelines,...

The aim of this work is to provide empirical elements on the performance of consumer credit companies in the European Union by applying efficiency frontier techniques. These techniques, widely applied in banking literature, provide sophisticated measures of performance – the efficiency scores....

[From the Introduction] The consumer credit market depends on the exchange of personal information among market participants. Credit bureaus are the primary repositories of this information, and in recent years they have gathered a vast amount of data on creditworthiness of individuals....

[From the Introduction] This study provides new evidence on the emergence of a single eurozone retail banking market with particular reference to consumer credit. Given the heterogeneous nature of consumer credit products in the eurozone, the authors reject the earlier proposition of the...