The divergence between increasingly supranational financial marketson the one hand and still largely national supervisory structures onthe other gives rise to tensions which reduce the effectiveness ofthe supervision.(...)

[...]I will begin with deregulation. Compared with the regulatedEuropean financial systems of the postwar period, mostEuropean countries have been liberalizing their financialservices sectors. This trend began in the mid-1960s andaccelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time,...

[...]In this article, we provide insight into the policyaspects of this informational time decay by assessing howthe length of time between bank examinations affects thequality of information available to supervisors. For thesepurposes, we define the quality of information in terms ofhow...

In this paper, we investigate the claim that German banks are special compared to banks in other industrialised economies. We show that banks are of particular importance to the German economy?as financial intermediary, as lender to the corporate sector, and as part of the corporate governance...

I review the state of the art of the academic theoretical and empirical literature on the potential trade-off between competition and stability in banking. There are two basic channels through which competition may increase instability: by exacerbating the coordination problem of...

This paper discusses the incentive conflicts that arise in banking supervision in the EU in a principal-agent framework, where the regulator is the agent and the taxpayers is the principal. The regulatory agent in addition to maintaining financial stability (the objective of the principal) may...

We assess the influence of competition and capital regulation on the stability of the banking system. We particularly ask two questions: i) how does capital regulation affect (endogenous) entry; and ii) how do (exogenous) changes in the competitive environment affect bank monitoring choices and...

This paper considers the implementation challenges facing the Basel Committee's new proposals on bank capital standards. When compared with the existing Capital Accord, the proposals represent a shift across two intersecting dimensions-regulatory versus economic capital, and rules-based versus...