Banks and financial markets in times of uncertainty

The papers included in this Special issue are selected from the 2nd Essex Finance Centre (EFiC) Conference in Banking and Finance entitled ‘Banks and Financial Markets in Times of Uncertainty’ that took place on July 7-8, 2017 at the Essex Business School, University of Essex, United Kingdom. The Conference attracted circa 120 academics, practitioners and regulators participating as delegates from 45 universities around the world. The conference covered a wide range of topics related to banking and financial markets and over 50 research papers were presented. The conference featured two keynote speakers. The first was Thorsten Beck, a Professor of Banking and Finance at Cass Business School and a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and CESifo. His keynote address focused on the topic ‘Finance and Growth: Where Do We Stand? ’ The second keynote speaker was Brendan McCabe, Professor of Econometrics at the University of Liverpool. He presented the fifth annual EFiC memorial lecture in celebration of our colleague John Nankervis who sadly passed away in 2012 and was a Professor of Finance at Essex Business School. His keynote topic was ‘Forecasting with Approximate Bayesian Computation. ’ Following the standard double-blind review process of the European Journal of Finance, five papers have been accepted in this Special issue which covers a wide range of topics in banking and finance. In particular, this issue covers topics such as bank board diversity, macroprudential policy and credit cycles, deregulation and competition in the UK deposit-taking sector, anomalies (financial strength) in stock markets and contagion in currency markets. Three of the papers relate to banking andmacroprudential policy broadly defined,whilst two of them focus on other financial markets – the equity market and the CDS (credit default swap) market. All of them are empirical studies and their data samples include the global financial crisis (GFC) period 2007-2009, which represents in large part the uncertainty theme of the Conference. The effect of the GFC can be direct as encapsulated by contagion and domino effects in emerging market currencies or indirect as in the case of the GFC leading to new policies on the part of regulators. A good example of the latter comes in the first paper, where the CRD IV, a European Union (EU) Directive covering prudential rules for banks, inter alia, incorporated changes to rules on corporate governance. In particular, thisDirective promotes diversity in board composition, but does not suggest imposing quotas. One contemporary problem is that there is still significant fragmentation among European countries with some arguing against mandatory quotas and setting different rules in relation to sanctions for non-compliance with gender balance. The most recent Gender Equality Index from the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) reveals that some progress has been made in terms of equality in decision making but the pace is slow and there is a need for greater harmonisation. The first paper in this Special issue is particularly timely following the recent growing interest in board diversity as a driver of firm economic performance in both the academic and the business communities. The title