Assessing European financial integration has proved difficult because of complex financial intermediation activities carried out in some European financial centres (Ireland, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) whose scale has grown enormously over time. We refer to these three countries as "onshore...

What is an acceptable level of return on equity (RoE) for a bank? This question is likely to play a pivotal role in the post-crisis debate among banking executives, investors and regulators. Following the spectacular losses in the financial crisis and the massive government intervention, there...

In 1936, John Maynard Keynes proposed that emotions and instincts are pivotal in decision-making, particularly for investors. Both positive and negative moods can influence judgments and decisions, extending to economic and financial choices. Intuitions, emotional states, and biases...

The ECB has collected data on the unrealised losses of significant institutions under its direct supervision with a view to enhancing the assessment of risk in the held-to-maturity portfolios of euro area banks and to furthering its monitoring of interest rate risk and liquidity risk.

The regulatory use of banks' internal models aims at making capital requirements more accurate and reducing regulatory arbitrage, but may also give banks incentives to choose their risk models strategically. Current policy answers to this problem include the use of risk-weight floors and...

This manual aims to further clarify and illustrate the requirements laid down in the Regulation and the Guideline; it contains no additional requirements and has no legally binding status. A clear and consistent understanding of the statistical requirements contained in the Regulation and the...

We propose a new method to identify the impact of a change in the tax burden on mutual fund inflows, exploiting a switch from an accrual-based to a realization-based tax regime. We use quasi-experimental data from Italy where, starting from July 2011, the tax regime for domestic mutual funds was...

We measure the commonality in hedge fund returns, identify its main driving factor and analyze its implications for financial stability. We find that hedge funds' commonality increased significantly from 2003 until 2006. We attribute this rise mainly to the increase in hedge funds' exposure to...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households' investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...