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The British retail banking market has changed markedly since the beginning of the 1970s, and important trends and developments have increased the competitive pressures facing banks. The whole nature of competition in British retail banking has altered. New competitors and new forms of competition have appeared with increasing rapidity. These changes and the associated pressures on banks have intensified during the 1980s. At the same time, banks have increased the comparative importance of retail banking within their strategies. These pressures and their associated implications for British retail banking strategy are explored. It is emphasised that marketing will need increasingly to dominate bank strategies in retail banking. This orientation towards marketing has important strategic and managerial consequences for banks.

The paper uses annual and pooled data on Australian banks for the years 1994 to 1996 to test the two competing hypotheses of market structure and performance; namely, the structure‐conduct‐performance hypothesis (in concentrated markets firms derive higher profits due to collusion) and the efficiency hypothesis (firms derive higher profits because they are efficient). We test these two and other two intervening hypothesis in the context of the Australian banking market. The results reject the efficiency hypothesis and also the two intermediate hypotheses but there is a lack of strong evidence to reject the structure‐conduct‐performance hypothesis. The results are important because such an empirical investigation has not been conducted in Australia to date. The results suggest that it may be hard to defend abolishing the Four‐pillar Policy (which was a major recommendation of Wallis Report 1997) on efficiency grounds.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of the financial crisis in Western Europe, primarily from a country‐level and banking sector perspective, from 2007 to the spring of 2009. It aims to detail measures enacted by governments and central banks to deal with impaired bank assets, recapitalize or otherwise resolve troubled banks, and inject liquidity into the banking system. It also aims to examine reform proposals aimed at creating a more secure and stable financial system.

The paper draws on factual material and analysis that is presented in central bank reports, other banking sector surveys and reports, media reports, and analysis by leading academics and practitioners sourced from published articles and books, working papers and blogs.

Recent firefighting measures to purchase impaired assets, recapitalize troubled banks, and inject liquidity have commanded widespread support, despite moral hazard concerns surrounding publicly funded bank bailouts. However, the roadmap to recovery remains uncertain. There is concern that significant volumes of impaired assets have been retained on many Western European bank balance sheets. Under the regulatory framework that is being shaped in response to the crisis, banks are expected to become leaner, more strongly capitalized and less highly leveraged, and to develop improved risk management practices.

This paper is written for a broad audience to provide a descriptive summary of the financial crisis in Western Europe, a survey of the debate concerning the implications for bank regulation and an extensive bibliography that will serve as a valuable resource for banking academics and practitioners.

This paper develops the approach suggested by Howe et al. to examine the impact of cross‐listings on stock price volatility in Europe.

A modified generalized autoregressive conditional hetero‐skedasticity (GARCH) modeling approach as suggested by Li and Engle is used taking into account different regulatory structures across the range of markets using LaPorta et al.'s stock market regulatory classification.

It is found that information spillover effects are important for the Dutch market for cross‐listed equities and that a different regulatory environment may have a noteworthy impact on symmetric information spillovers.

The focus is 11 cross‐listing equities and on an event window of 12 years. This implies that the results may be biased on the data sample and the length of the period that used.

The findings are important for the shareholders of cross‐listed companies as the various impacts of regulatory differences between markets (as a result of low and high shareholder protection rules) from foreign markets to the Dutch home market are identified.

A primary focus of this paper is to provide a different methodology than the one adopted by Howe et al. using a modified GARCH modeling approach as suggested by Li and Engle, to examine the impact of the cross‐listings of Dutch firms on symmetric volatility spillovers. The analysis also takes into account the influence of different regulatory structures across the range of markets where Dutch firms are cross‐listed. In particular, we use LaPorta et al.'s stock market regulatory classification is used to analyze the magnitude and persistence of symmetric volatility spillovers from the foreign listing to the home equity of cross‐listed companies in the Dutch stock exchange.

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the structure, regulation, and performance of banks in the EU and G‐10 countries. This enables one to identify any significant differences in the structure of banking in the nineteen separate countries comprising these two groups. The regulatory, supervisory, and deposit‐insurance environment in which banks operate in each of these countries is also compared and contrasted. This enables one to identify any significant differences in the regulatory environment that may help explain the structure of banking in the various countries. Beyond this, the effect of the overall structural and regulatory environment on individual bank performance is investigated in order to evaluate the appropriateness of existing regulations in individual countries and any proposals for reforming them. Hence, an exploratory empirical analysis based upon a sample of banks in the different countries is conducted to assess the effect of the different “regulatory regimes” on the performance of individual banks, controlling for various bank‐specific and country‐specific factors that may also affect bank performance. In this way, the paper attempts to contribute to an assessment of the appropriate balance between market and regulatory discipline to ensure that banks have sufficient opportunities to compete prudently and profitability in a competitive and global financial marketplace. In the process of conducting such an assessment, the paper necessarily provides information as to whether the U.S. is “out‐of‐step” with banking developments in other industrial countries.

Leaders are recognizing that the current connected era is fundamentally changing how customers, employees and partners engage, according to an IBM survey of CEOs and senior public sector leaders from around the globe.

Between September 2011 and January 2012, IBM leaders met face to face with leaders worldwide to better understand their future plans and challenges in an increasingly connected economy. The CEOs surveyed lead organizations of different sizes in 64 countries and 18 industries The analysis also sought to understand differences between responses of CEOs in financially outperforming organizations and those in underperforming organizations.

Key survey findings include: CEOs are creating more open and collaborative cultures – encouraging employees to connect, learn from each other and thrive in a world of rapid change; the emphasis on openness and collaboration is even higher among outperforming organizations; to engage customers as individuals, CEOs are investing in customer insights more than any other functional area; and extensive partnering is providing the edge CEOs need to take on radical innovation.

Three suggested initiatives to promote superior performance are: embrace connectivity and openness; engage customers as individuals; and amplify innovation with partnerships.

Explains that to create greater value, CEOs must take advantage of newly enabled connections with and among employees, customers and partners. Shows that to lead in this unfamiliar territory amid constant change, CEOs will need to learn from their own networks. They will need to assemble those networks like portfolios – with generational, geographic, institutional diversity. Then, they will need to help their organizations do the same.

The global banking environment is experiencing significant change as regulatory and geographical barriers to competition are reduced. As these barriers are removed, greater integration of banking services is developing throughout the world affecting the performance and structure of banking institutions. This research examines the stock returns and volatility of stock returns for a sample of banks in the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan. The general focus is to identify factors influencing the return and risk and to examine cross‐country differences in these factors. The results suggest that while size does not affect return volatility for any of the categories of banks, it does affect returns for banks in Japan, the U.S. and other non‐universal banking systems. Likewise, the investment in fixed assets appears consistently to adversely affect returns. A number of differences are found across country borders and across type of institutions (i.e. universal versus non‐universal banks).

The purpose of this paper is to test whether bank mergers are driven by equity overvaluation and management compensation incentives.

To test whether equity mispricing drive bank mergers, the authors employ two alternative price-to-residual income valuation (P/V) measures for bidders and targets while the authors control for their growth prospects with the price-to-book (P/B) (two years before) ratio. The intrinsic value (V) is estimated using the three-period forecast horizon residual income model of Ohlson (1995) and perpetual residual income model that does not rely on analysts’ forecasts of future earnings prospects. The latter measure allows the authors to estimate V for a much larger sample of banks. The empirical analysis is supplemented with a standard event analysis and assessment of the long-term performance of bank mergers subsequent to the announcement date.

The evidence shows that bidders are overvalued relative to their targets, especially in equity offer deals. The authors also find that highly valued bidders: are more likely to use stock than cash; are willing to pay more relative to the target market price; are more likely to acquire private than public targets; earn lower announcement-period returns; fail to create synergy gains; experience long-term underperformance; and reward their top managers of with large compensation increases subsequent to mergers.

This study provides results consistent with the view that behavioral and managerial incentives play an important role in motivating bank mergers.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the market structure and financial performance of Malaysian commercial banks over the period of 2000 to 2011 by testing the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) and efficient-structure (ESH) hypotheses.

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed to measure the efficiency of banks, while concentration ratio is used to assess the market structure of Malaysian banks. Next, utilizing the least squares method, both variables – market structure and efficiency of banks – among other explanatory variables (market share, operating expenses, loans ratio and size of banks) are regressed upon the dependent variable, namely financial performance of banks represented by return on asset (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and net interest margin (NIMTA).

The concentration of Malaysian banking industry is at a declining trend; structurally speaking, Malaysian banks are more competitive due to less market concentration. In terms of efficiency, the DEA results reveal that Malaysian banks are operating below their capacity at 40 per cent of efficiency. Thus, Malaysian banks could reduce their utilization of inputs by 60 per cent to operate on the efficient frontier. Next, the results offer support to ESH, which implies that market concentration and banking efficiency determines the profitability performance of Malaysian commercial banks.

Past studies on Malaysian banking sector had tended to focus either on measuring the performance or assessing the market structure of banks. Thus, this study attempts to fill the gap in the literature by testing the nexus between the market structure and the performance of banks.