The financial transformation journey is often addressed through trying to avoid the pitfalls associated with the causes of failure while leveraging the critical success factors. At best, Chief Financial Officers adopting this approach are likely to improve the degree of customer service experienced by Finance department. This is unlikely to lead to sustainable financial transformation being ach...

In the last two decades the European financial markets have become more market oriented. We analyze the economic and political forces that have triggered these changes as well as their likely welfare implications. We also try to assess whether this trend will continue. Based on our analysis, we conjecture that even if Europe might benefit from a continuation of the trend, in the near future pol...

N.B. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily correspond to the views of the European Central Bank. Hartmann of the European Central Bank. The usual caveat applies: The author is solely responsible for errors or omissions.

Constructing skew and heavy-tailed distributions by transforming a standard normal variable goes back to Tukey (1977) and was extended and formalized by Hoaglin (1983) and Martinez & Iglewicz (1984). Applications of Tukey’s GH distribution family – which are composed by a skewness transformation G and a kurtosis transformation H – can be found, for instance, in financial, environmental or medic...