Using a sample of 50 countries during 2000-2008, this study investigates the possible impact of insurance regulations on life insurance consumption. The evidence reveals a negative and statistically significant association between supervisory control of the policy conditions of life annuities...

There exists a lively debate as for the appropriate architecture of the financial supervision regime, with a long list of theoretical advantages and disadvantages associated with each one of its key dimensions. The present study investigates whether and how bank profit efficiency are influenced...

This study investigates whether capital market values the efficiency of firms. Tracing stock returns and efficiency changes of 399 listed insurance firms in 52 countries during the 2002-2008 period, the paper reports a positive and statistically significant relationship between profit efficiency...

This study uses a sample of foreign and domestic banks operating in Greece during 1999-2004 to examine the impact of ownership on efficiency. We estimate an input oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) model under variable returns to scales with inputs and outputs selected on the basis of a...

In this paper, we investigate the relative performance of both linear and non-linear support vector machines (SVMs) models with a polynomial and an RBF kernel in the development of classification models for the prediction of EU bank acquisition targets. The training sample consists of 274 banks,...

We use a sample of acquired and non-acquired commercial banks from the principal EU markets and logistic regression analysis to investigate the relationship between bank characteristics and the likelihood to be acquired. The results indicate the existence of differences across countries either...

We propose a holistic evaluation framework that banks could adopt when screening corporate entities. The framework is based on the development of a composite indicator of social, environmental and financial performance. This integrated view of evaluation is conceptually aligned with ISO...