The paper discusses state, regulative framework, and recent developments in leveraging access to finance for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in the Kyrgyz Republic through global value chain (GVC) examples in the Kyrgyz Republic. Access to finance in the Kyrgyz Republic is...

Uzbekistan set an ambitious goal to achieve the status of an upper-middle-income country by 2030, with the focus on growing a large and solid middle-class social stratum. The current reforms in Uzbekistan largely target the development of small businesses and private entrepreneurship (SME) as...

One of the major issues for SME development has been access to finance. This paper examines the current state of SME development and financing in Kazakhstan. It also examines the current state of the development of value chains and discusses barriers for agriculture value chain financing. The...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

We investigate whether the value of large banks, defined as banks with assets in excess of the Dodd-Frank threshold for enhanced supervision, increases with the size of their assets using Tobin's q and market-to-book as our valuation measures. Many argue that large banks receive subsidies from...

This article examines the primary motivation of the bank merger waves in the 1990s. Our investigation of the factors that determine bid premiums paid for target banks focuses on the importance of the financial characteristics of the targets, composition of their boards of directors, and the...

Efforts to recapitalize banks in the current crisis have to date been focused on government assistance under the TARP, rather than private investment, and on bank holding companies, rather than banks. We describe three alternative or complementary approaches designed to lower the cost of bank...

Commercial bank merger and acquisition (Mamp;A) transactions are especially informative for analyzing the impact of differing corporate governance structures on the balance of corporate control between managers and shareholders. We exploit these special characteristics to investigate the balance...

Banks are special, and so is the corporate governance of banks and other financial institutions as compared with the general corporate governance of non-banks. Empirical evidence, mostly gathered after the financial crisis, confirms this. Banks practicing good corporate governance in the...

Price-to-book ratios have been unusually low for many banks since the Great Financial Crisis. Ratios below one, in particular, have been seen as reflecting market concerns about banks' health and profitability as well as the need for shifts in business models. But what drives these valuations...