Passporting rights have been well availed of in this sector, too, and the total number of Notifications for European Insurance Undertakings to carry on business in Malta under the Freedom to Provide Services directive now stands at 204. The other reflection I would like to share with you is inspired by an interview given recently by the CEO of Mediterranean Bank to a local economic magazine, in which Malta was referred to as ‘a secure EU jurisdiction’. In this same context it was stated that ‘Malta’s stability is an important part of its appeal as a banking location’. While such accolades are indeed welcome, they do not come entirely as a surprise. For when Malta’s financial legislation was overhauled in 1994, and when EU legislation was later transposed in anticipation of EU membership, an intended by-product was indeed the incorporation of the highest international standards and best practices into Maltese financial laws and regulations. This was accompanied by a strengthening of the institutional framework for the regulation and oversight of the financial system. In 2002 the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) became the single regulator for financial services when it took over the responsibility for the banking sector from  BIS Review 92/2006  1  the Central Bank of Malta (CBM). The Bank then assumed responsibility for ensuring the stability of the entire financial system. A year later Malta volunteered to undergo a Financial Sector Assessment Programme (FSAP) by the IMF and the World Bank.
Specifically, our research indicates that when college tuition rises in a state, it leads to higher levels of student debt and a lower homeownership rate. These factors matter for inequality and social mobility, because increasing home equity is the major form of wealth accumulation for the great majority of American families. Thus, rising tuition and changes in the way that college is financed appear to have diminished the ability of higher education to lift people from poverty into the middle class. Of course, students’ reliance on debt and the returns from graduating vary across educational institutions. Of particular interest here is recent work by Raj Chetty and his co-authors showing that some colleges—some of which can be found in the CUNY and California state systems— appear to be much better at fostering economic mobility than others. In other words, they accept relatively large numbers of lower-income students while also producing large numbers of high earners, which means that these institutions facilitate considerable upward mobility. Learning exactly how they do it and how it can be replicated strikes me as a first-order question for further study. Recent research by Caroline Hoxby to assess differences in productivity across educational institutions makes important progress in that direction. In summary, academic research on the financing, costs, and returns of higher education is more important now than it has ever been. We are pleased to have many of those researchers participating in this conference.