The ongoing globalization of financial markets has increased the import ance to users of financial services, policy-makers and financial analysts of understanding the structure and operation of banking systems in other countries as well as that in their own country. This volume contributes to such an understanding. The structure and operation of the banking system are described for 10 important countries, plus the European Economic Community, under one cover. The contributing authors are knowledgable and widely respected experts. The author, or at least one of the coauthors, of each chapter is a resident of the country described. Each chapter follows a broadly similar outline, although the attention devoted to any particular area varies substantially according to authors' perceptions of its relative importance in the particular country. The chapters spotlight the similarities and differences among the structures. The volume should serve as both a handy and authoritative reference guide for practitioners, regulators and students of international banking. An early benefit of the book was an international conference held in Chicago in the fall of 1989 on the world integration of financial markets. A number of the authors of the chapters presented brief versions of their papers. The conference was sponsored jointly by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the MidAmerica Institute. The audience was primarily senior officers and regulators of financial institutions in the midwest. The conference generated considerable interest in both the subject matter and the contents of this book.

A heavily researched text especially for advanced students, scholars, and professionals in the field, highly recommended for the economics studies shelves of college libraries. Midwest Book Review While corporate governance in general has received considerable attention from economists in recent years, governance of banks specifically has received relatively little. Yet this is an important area both because banking is a large and important sector and because it is highly regulated so that the stakeholders and directors must share their governance authority with government regulators. This volume helps fill the gap. The 13 chapters, primarily by economists from a number of different countries, analyze governance in banking in both the US and other countries. Thus the reader can evaluate both the quality and effectiveness of bank governance across different economic environments. This makes the volume highly valuable to corporate investors and managers as well as researchers and government policymakers. George Kaufman, Loyola University, US Recent corporate scandals, together with the effects of globalization, have led to an increasing interest in corporate governance issues. Little attention has been paid, however, to international laws and recommendations dealing with corporate governance in banking from a global perspective. This impressive international set of expert contributors academics, practitioners and regulators remedies the lack of attention by examining the various issues and concerns of this important topic. The regulation of corporate banking and accounting is increasingly promoted through various international bodies. Against this background, the contributors explore such aspects of corporate governance as: bank regulation and activity expansion in the US, board structure, community banks, the Enron and WorldCom corporate governance failures, a survey of characteristics of the top 100 world banks, as well as case studies of Australian, German and Hungarian banks. Scholars, regulators, and those on the boards of financial institutions will find the analysis of this understudied area of great interest.

Reflecting on the breadth of its scope, Aspects of Globalisation is intended to serve a varied audience. Being at the forefront of research, it should appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in new approaches and ideas for future research. To this end, the editors have encouraged the contributors to pursue varied themes and raise new issues, approach their subject matter in an analytically rigorous way, and to include fairly extended review sections within their papers, so as to make them useful to a wider readership. Furthermore, diverse methodologies are followed, including the widespread use of state-of-the-art econometrics, reflecting the recent trend in economic analysis. Equally importantly, many of the papers offer clear-cut policy conclusions and should therefore be of direct relevance to policy-minded analysts and policy-makers. We thus hope that the papers included here will provoke further research and ideas as well as contribute to ongoing policy debates. Its diversity, rigour and scope should be positive attributes of the volume and should make it a useful source of information for researchers and policy-makers alike.

In the many studies that have been conducted on the provision of financial services for consumers, regulation has emerged as one of the most important factors. The impact of regulation on financial service industries is a major focus of this comprehensive bibliography of relevant source materials in the field of regulatory economics. The bibliography includes entries from the major economics and finance journals published over the past twenty years, major law and business journals,government documents, books, and doctoral dissertations--all indexed according to subject matter--as well as abstracts of many of the papers.The product of extensive research, Heggestad's work is invaluable to university libraries, regulatory agencies, financial institutions, and financial experts, and is an efficient and essential reference tool for anyone wishing to study specific markets and the impact of financial regulation on them.

This text provides a modern statement of the theory and practice of domestic and international banking and finance. Today, banks are no longer limited to retail deposit-taking and lending operations; they engage in wholesale banking activities, off-balance sheet business, and activities beyond domestic markets. The principles of all these types of bank services are lucidly discussed. Separate chapters provide general background on payments systems, Eurocurrency markets, bank safety and depositor protection. The authors' conception is unique in providing a comparative study in a geographical sense (they deal with banking in the U.S., Britain, and Australia) and in an institutional sense, tracing parallels between operations of banks and other financial institutions, particularly insurance companies. With the growing impact of financial innovations and the internationalization of financial markets, Domestic and International Banking is the innovative text needed for courses on monetary and banking policy and on capital markets and financial institutions. Mervyn K. Lewis is Midland Bank Professor of Money and Banking at the University of Nottingham, and Kevin T. Davis is Professor of Finance at the University of Melbourne.

This volume of essays comprises a systematic collection of views from scholars and practitioners on the future of financial systems and services and reflects the fact that the financial industry worldwide is involved in a major restructuring process.

The basic functions of banking—lending, deposit taking, and making payments—are constant. What changes are the forms banking takes in response to increases in competition, globalizaion, new laws, and emerging technologies. Among the most visible of these changes will be an increase in the consolidation and globalization of banking in the world's major trading countries. Now, prestigious academics and practitioners, including regulators from around the world, join Benton E. Gup in exploring these coming changes—and by doing so, define a global perspective on banking's future. They find that the consolidation of banking will persist on a global scale. Electronic banking in all its forms will increase in importance, and banking in mature economies will be even more different from what it is now in developing economies. While focusing on the financial system in the United States, Gup's panel of contributors also explores financial systems in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Like Gup, they predict that a small handful of very large banks will control a disproportionate share of bank assets. Their views provide an unusual survey of current thinking in the domains of banking and finance, and an important source of current information, background, and foresights for banking and finance practitioners, students, and academics.