A Global Analysis of of Imperfect Competition in the Banking Systems and the Latest Israeli Regulation Dealing with Market Failures. ACES Working Paper No. 3, 2007

The high concentration of the banking sector is a cross-border phenomenon that has high impact on local and global economies. This paper's main goal is to analyze the factors that impact concentration in the banking systems around the globe. The innovation of this paper is that we combined economic, "economic environment", and culture variables as explanatory variables for this analysis. We found among other things that regulation in the banking system is helpful in order to keep it competitive. We also found that when the society has more individual values rather than collective ones, its banking sector is less concentrated. In the second part of the paper we focused on the Israeli case, showing that although recent indicators of the Israeli banking system indicate a higher level of concentration and lower level of competition, it seems that the recent trend is moving toward less concentration and higher competition.

More Union for the EU’s IPO Market. ECMI Commentary No. 41/23 March 2016

n his assessment of the latest draft prospectus Regulation, published on 30 November 2015, Karel Lannoo argues in this ECMI Commentary that the text goes somewhat further than the European Commission has previously entertained, but it falls short of creating a European market. In his view, the Commission is hostage to its own (or member states’) unwillingness to expand the powers of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) to become an EU-wide listing authority. In short, the Union that the EU wants to create for capital markets still seems a distant ambition.