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The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of selected internal and external factors on a bank’s profitability. The research investigates the impact of operational size, liquidity, risk appetite, management efficiency, product diversification, concentration, GDP growth and inflation change on the profitability of sample of 4179 European commercial banks for the period between 2011 and 2015. The input data were obtained from the Orbis Focus and the World Bank databases. The determinants were used to construct two models with ROAA and ROAE as a proxies and regression analysis using between groups panel approach was conducted. It has been found that growing economy impacts banks’ profitability positively. It has been robustly confirmed that management efficiency, product diversification, market concentration and inflation result in decreased profitability. The operational size has been found to be negatively linked to changes in net results but was confirmed only with ROAA model. Similarly, statistically significant results with regard to liquidity were found only for ROAA model and the correlation was positive. The strong negative impact of market concentration on profitability is an interesting finding allowing for further exploration of reasons for this unexpected vector of correlation.

<p><em>This piece of work seeks to perform detailed review and analysis of those factors that precipitated global financial and economic crises in 2008 with a focus on the United Kingdom economy. Impacts of the crises from both micro and macro economy perspectives are also analysed in conjunction with the sudden change in government policies from less rigid fiscal prudence, price stability, unsupportive employment policies as well as weak financial services supervision to unconventional stiff fiscal and monetary policies as well as hard core financial regulations with a primary aim to cleaning up the economic and the financial mess that characterised the meltdown. To finalise this work, it is concluded that efficiency of policy actions to address the economic menace to a large extent, helped British Economy to get out of the crisis despite that all the measures adopted were not considered to be perfect in its entirety. Other potential areas of study are also identified. </em></p>

<p><em>The great recession heralded in by the subprime mortgage crisis, took a dramatic turn for worse as a result of collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank in September 2008. The crisis deemed to be the most devastating after the Great Depression of 1929, had a debilitating effect on world economies, developing and advanced alike.  The extent of its devastation which is still being felt in Europe and many parts of the globe reminds us the interconnectedness of financial institutions, particularly those tagged TBTF or SIFIs. Policy makers scrambled to curtail the ugly effect of the crisis by rescuing the SIFIs within their jurisdiction largely through bailout mechanism and provision of implicit guarantee for the debts of failing/failed institutions. As soon as the tide is stemmed, they cast their gaze on new crisis resolution and recovery measures that could rein in systemic risks associated with SIFIs, prevent future crises and reduce the concomitant moral hazards in the current resolution measures. The objective of this paper is to assess ex ante the potential impacts of implementing the new Banking recovery and resolution directives on Europe’s TBTF banks.</em></p>

<p>The paper concentrates on value and size effects in country portfolios. It contributes to academic literature threefold. First, I provide fresh evidence that the value and size effects may be useful in explaining the cross-sectional variation in country returns. The computations are based on a broad sample of 66 countries in years 2000-2013. Second, I document that the country-level value and size effects are indifferent to currency conversions. Finally, I introduce an alternative macro-level Fama-French model, which, contrary to its prototype, employs country-based factors. I show that applying this modification makes the model more successful in evaluation of funds with global investment mandate than the standard CAPM and FF models.</p>

The Great Financial Crisis has been touted to be the worst crisis since the Great Depression of 1930; its effect has profound ramifications on the global economy. The nature and the severity of the crisis provoked an unprecedented policy response from policy makers at both global and domestic levels. To address the rampaging crisis, the Bank of England implemented a number of conventional and unconventional policy measures to curtail the economic rot and to stimulate economic growth. There is a broad consensus in the empirical literature and other evidence found in this paper that a number of the policies implemented in the United Kingdom played a significant role in re-directing and stimulating the economy. This paper reviews the various policy measures adopted by the Bank of England from the inception of the financial crisis in 2008 and assesses their effectiveness in bringing back the economy from the brink of collapse. Our review shows that quantitative easing (QE) policy and the expansionary fiscal policy adopted by the Bank of England were effective policy tools used in stimulating economic growth, stemming the effect and shortening the duration of the crisis in the United Kingdom

The study concentrates on the benefits of passive commodity investments in the context of the phenomenon of financialization. The research investigates the implications of increase in the correlation coefficients between equity and commodity investments for investors in financial markets. The paper is composed of several parts. First, the attributes of commodity investments and their benefits in the portfolio optimization are explored. Second, the phenomenon of the financialization is described and the research hypothesis is developed. Next, an empirical analysis is performed. I simulate the mean-variance spanning tests to examine the benefits of commodity investments before and after accounting for the impact of financialization. I proceed separate analysis for pre- and post-financialization period. The empirical research is based on asset classes’ returns and other related variables from years 1991-2012. The performed investigations indicate that the market financialization may have significant implications for commodity investors. Due to increase in correlation coefficients, the inclusion of the commodity futures in the traditional stock-bond portfolio appears to be no longer reasonable.

The paper concentrates on value and size effects in country portfolios. It contributes to academic literature threefold. First, I provide fresh evidence that the value and size effects may be useful in explaining the cross-sectional variation in country returns. The computations are based on a broad sample of 66 countries in years 2000-2013. Second, I document that the country-level value and size effects are indifferent to currency conversions. Finally, I introduce an alternative macro-level Fama-French model, which, contrary to its prototype, employs country-based factors. I show that applying this modification makes the model more successful in evaluation of funds with global investment mandate than the standard CAPM and FF models.

The paper concentrates on the value premium across countries and contributes to the investment and asset pricing literature in three ways. First, I provide fresh evidence that the high-value countries perform significantly better than the low-value countries. Additionally, this phenomenon is indifferent to the choice of the computational currency, representative index or value indicator. Second, I demonstrate that the value effect can be successfully amplified by combining with country-level size and momentum effects. Third, I show that returns to the high-value countries deteriorate in financial crisis conditions, because the country-level value premium is negatively correlated with the credit spreads, TED spread and expected volatility. I examine data from 66 markets between years 2000 and 2013.