World financial markets have experienced tremendous growth in recent years. New financial instruments have been developed, the volume of transactions within individual markets has skyrocketed, and capital flows across countries have risen dramatically. While these developments have made financial markets more efficient, they have also increased the risk that events at one institution or in one ...

Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper provides an overview of the current structure and integration of the euro area financial systems and related policy initiatives. We first compare the euro area financial structure with that of the United States and Japan. Using new and comprehensive financial account data, we also describe how the euro area financial structure evolved si...

We provide a comprehensive review of firms’ financing channels (internal and external, domestic and international) around the globe, with the focus on alternative finance—financing from all the nonmarket, non-bank external sources. We argue that while traditional financing channels, including financial markets and banks, provide significant sources of funds for firms in developed countries, alt...

We examine the effect of financial openness on the development of financial systems in a panel of 35 emerging markets during the period of 1976 to 2003. A group of indicators including variables from banking sector, stock market, and national capital accounts are used as measures of financial openness and financial development. In addition, aggregate index measures are developed to incorporate ...

In this paper, we deal and evaluate the comparison problem among different financial markets using risk/variability measures consistent with investors’ preferences. First, we recall a recent classification of multivariate stochastic orderings consistent with preferences and we properly define the selection problem among different financial markets. Secondly, we propose an empirical financial ap...

We study a labour market equilibrium model in which firms sign optimal long-term contracts with workers. Firms that are financially constrained offer an increasing wage profile: they pay lower wages today in exchange for higher future wages once they become unconstrained. Because constrained firms grow faster, the model predicts a positive correlation between the growth of wages and the growth ...

We propose to put the environment into financial markets. We shall explain how to do it, and why the financial approach is practically the only one able to stop and invert environmental degradation. We shall concentrate on deforestation, which is the largest environmental problem in the third world, and explain how to start the project and what kind of optimization problems should be solved to ...

I this paper, we use a unique data set on the Italian interdealer bond market to empirically estimate the process of strategic experimentation. The results show how the information generated in the process of interdealer trading affects the incentive to experiment. Upon receipt of an order, dealers deliberately engage in trade with other dealers either to exploit the information contained in th...