When focusing on banks' repo businesses, it appears that the regulatory approach has gradually developed around two main themes: the role of collateral in repo-style transactions and the supervisory attention given to different risk categories. The regulatory treatment of collateral has recently...

Economic capital models have recently come into vogue as a tool to measure risk and return on a firm-wide basis and to allocate capital accordingly. Further research into this subject was deemed of common interest to both the financial industry and financial supervisors, as the regulatory regime...

Measures of concentration and competition are of vital importance for welfare-related public policy toward market structure and conduct in the banking industry. Theoretical characteristics of ten market concentration measures are discussed and numerical examples illustrate differences and...

The proposed risk sensitive minimum requirements of the new Basel Capital Accord have raised concerns about possible (acceleration of) procyclical behaviour of banking, which might threat en macroeconomic stability. This article analyses the interaction between business cycles and banks over the...

At the Informal Ecofin Council of April 2000, ministers and governors discussed the EFC's report on financial stability issues. The report concluded that the existing regulatory and supervisory arrangements in Europe provide a coherent and flexible basis for safeguarding financial stability, but...

(paper is in Dutch) This study surveys the behavioural finance literature. It discusses both the literature that incorporates behavioural considerations into rational models, and the literature that concentrates on the role of prospect theory and the effect of cognitive-psychological mechanisms...

This paper provides some history of deposit insurance and investor protection in the Netherlands against the background of the history of such protection in the European Union, EU-legislation and the recent changes in the design of financial supervision in the Netherlands. It discusses how...

The efficiency of European banks is crucial in the light of the current and expected increase in competition. This paper seeks to discover the level and spread of bank efficiency in Europe. In particular, it focuses on differences across countries, various sizes of banks (reflecting several...

We analyse the development of foreign bank penetration in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and its influence on the stability of bank credit. We measure both cross-border credit and activities of foreign bank subsidiaries within CEE. By combining BIS statistics and BankScope data into a unique...

Technological change, especially in information technology, has brought profound changes to services sectors like the financial sector. Two decades ago, closed-system communications methods like faxing had yet to break through. Presently the internet, with its open architecture, makes new ways...