After decades of political and technical efforts to supranationalise prudential regulation at the EU level, a key step to bridge the gap between rule-making centralisation and its decentralised implementation has been the establishment of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM). In spite of its major accomplishments, the SSM faces a key challenge: achieving supervisory consistency in essentially diversified euro area banking systems.
This dissertation identifies the building blocks of supervisory consistency and the sources of diversity inherent in banking supervision; it also distinguishes internal from external dimensions of consistency, which correspond to national and banking diversities, respectively. Drawing on the qualitative analysis of official documents, speeches, public hearings, and interviews with national and supranational supervisors, banks, banks associations, and EU institutions, the research examines the relationships shaping the balance between consistency in integrated markets and diversity, by focusing on the SSM’s prudential and regulatory competences. It first traces and compares the evolution of supervisory governance through literature- and empirically-driven governance indicators and their conceptualisation. It then analyses the changing nature of the supervisory instruments beyond the hard-soft law dichotomy. The German and Italian cases are used to test the capacity of the supranational supervisor to accommodate diversity, and illustrate how different supervisory styles have emerged over time.
This study argues that centralisation, methodological standardisation, and the development of non-binding policy documents are important for the achievement of consistent results. However, the effectiveness of supranational law and its enforcement by the European Central Bank involve fundamental trade-offs: a more limited local autonomy, institutional overlap, communication and transparency concerns from banks, and legitimacy issues arising from supervisory instruments, can compromise the system. Nonetheless, thanks to its resources and privileged Banking Union-wide position, the SSM is well-placed to strengthen sensitivity to diversity in order to manage the current transformation of traditional banking paradigms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unitn.it/oai:iris.unitn.it:11572/259175 |
| Date | 29 April 2020 |
| Creators | del Barrio Arleo, Maria Cecilia |
| Contributors | del Barrio Arleo, Maria Cecilia, Antoniolli, Luisa |
| Publisher | Università degli studi di Trento, place:Trento |
| Source Sets | Università di Trento |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | firstpage:1, lastpage:428, numberofpages:428 |
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