Over the past few decades, the worldwide banking industry has undergone strong consolidation. As a result, the number of banks has fallen sharply. At the same time, the size of the largest banks has increased substantially, both in absolute figures and relative to the size of smaller banks. This...

This report presents an overview of the theory of regulation in general, with special attention for the regulation of banks. Two theories of government regulation are described. The first, normative, theory uses market failures as the justification of government regulation. The second, positive,...

This paper employs stochastic frontier cost and profit models to estimate economies of scale as well as X-efficiency for multi-billion dollar European and U.S. banks in the period 1995-1999. Empirical results with respect to separate analyses of large European and U.S. banks are strikingly...

This paper gives an overview of the recent literature on bank business models, structured along what we deem to be the three central questions when analysing business models. By doing so, we endeavour to provide the recent shift in prudential supervision towards the analysis of bank business...

This paper provides a survey on recent developments in the European banking industry. Traditional banking activities have contracted in relative terms, but banks remain the predomination players in the euro area financial system. Economic and monetary integration in the EU has strongly...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on the corporate governance of banks. We start by highlighting the main differences between banks and non-financial firms and focus on three characteristics which make banks special: (i) regulation, (ii) the capital structure of banks, and (iii) the...

This paper provides empirical evidence of behavioural responses by banks and their contribution to system-wide liquidity stress. Using firm-specific balance sheet data, we construct aggregate indicators of macro-prudential risk. Measures of size and herding show that balance sheet adjustments...

In this paper we focus on the assumption of a common efficient frontier when performing an efficiency study for the banking sector. The fact that environmental factors that are not appropriately controlled may easily bias efficiency estimates. First, we estimate a common cost and profit...

This paper considers the issue of forecasting financial fragility of banks and insurances using a panel data set of performance indicators, namely distance-to-default, taking unobserved common factors into account. We show that common factors are important in the performance of banks and...

Macro stress-testing has become an important tool to assess financial stability. This paper describes a tool kit for scenario analysis and macro stress-testing. It is based on a model which maps multivariate scenarios to banks' credit and interest rate risks by deterministic and stochastic...