When it comes to more recent times, evidence on the extent to which conflicts of interest resulting from close ties between banks and their potential borrowers may have adversely affected bank performance is limited to studies of the largest banking organizations. One example is my own research with Phil Strahan that looked at linkages between the boards of directors of banks and nonfinancial firms.
And here I would like to invite your contribution. Could you consider, for example, publishing what we might call “imported pages” from foreign newspapers? This would allow citizens to get a better sense of how issues are seen in other countries; it would increase cultural sensitivity; and it could generate Europe-wide debates that divide along policy lines rather than national lines.