Over the past 10 to 15 years banking (and the financial system more generally) has been dramatically transformed by deregulation, product innovation, the internationalisation of markets, and more volatile financial prices. Continuing change is assured by advances in communications, computing capacity and financial theory. Transaction and information costs will fall further, and the unbundling a...

Decision analytics commonly focuses on the text mining of financial news sources in order to provide managerial decision support and to predict stock market movements. Existing predictive frameworks almost exclusively apply traditional machine learning methods, whereas recent research indicates that traditional machine learning methods are not sufficiently capable of extracting suitable feature...

Because poorly developed financial markets block economic growth, it is argued that modern intermediaries (banks) have to replace traditional intermediaries. The claim is that the traditional intermediaries are inefficient. We test that claim using an original panel data set from nineteenthcentury France that is the first to provide quantitative evidence about traditional intermediaries (notari...

The main objective of the paper is to analyze the effects on economic agents’ behavior deriving from the introduction of financial activities aimed to environmental protection. The environmental protection mechanism we study should permit exchange of financial activities among citizens, firms, and Public Administration. Such a particular “financial market” is regulated by the Public Administrat...

Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This study tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. Using a novel dataset that contains all German banks’ international activities, we estimate the ordered probability of a presence abroad (extensive margin) and t...