â?¢ Capital Markets Union (CMU) is a welcome initiative. It could augment economic risk sharing, set the right conditions for more dynamic development of risk capital for high-growth firms and improve choices and returns for savers. This offers major potential for benefits in terms of jobs,...

Banking Union, even in its current incomplete form, is the single biggest structural policy success of the EU since the start of the financial crisis. This essay presents the sequence of events that led to its inception in late June 2012 and takes stock on its current status of implementation...

The system of multilateral rules and institutions that constitutes the global economic governance regime trails the rapid transformation of the world economy and the rise of pressing global issues. It faces significant challenges such as the resurgence of economic nationalism. It needs to adapt...

This paper takes stock of global efforts towards financial reform since the start of the financial crisis in 2007-08, and provides a synthetic (if simplified) picture of their status as of January 2012. Underlying dynamics are described and analysed both at the global level (particularly G-20,...

Although the United States and the European Union were both seriously impacted by the financial crisis of 2007, the resulting policy debates and regulatory responses have differed considerably on the two sides of the Atlantic. In this paper the authors examine the debates on the problem posed by...

This Working Paper presents a novel dataset documenting the demographics of the world’s 500 largest companies by market capitalisation, as of 30 September 2007. Assigning a birth date to a large company is not a straightforward exercise and involves a measure of judgment, which possibly...

European Union (EU) countries offer a unique experience of financial regulatory and supervisory integration, complementing various other European integration efforts following the Second World War. Financial regulatory and supervisory integration was a very slow process before 2008, despite...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) played a ground-breaking role in understanding the financial-sector dynamics of the euro-area crisis. It was the first public authority, and one of the first more generally, to acknowledge the role of the bank-sovereign vicious circle as the central driver...