We use an extensive sample of 763 bonds issued by financial institutions of three countries of the “European South”, in 1997, one year before the selection of the “first-wave” EMU participants, and in 1999, EMU’ s starting year, to investigate the extent to which the aforementioned...

In this paper, we use sixteen financial indices from the World Bank’s Financial Development and Structure database, to classify the OECD countries, according to their financial system structure, in five relatively homogenous clusters for the 1996-2005 period. We also examine the changes in...