ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed a strong development of the financial sector, increasingly affecting the real economy. The surge in quantity, quality and diversity of financial market participants, instruments and procedures, as well as of resources, is indeed remarkable. Numerous studies have shown that, over time, financial development has been increasingly driven by two major factors: innovation and globalization. A wave of financial innovations has helped multiply the volume of available funding. Simultaneously, the process of globalizing the financial markets has progressed at an extraordinary space. It has been fueled by factors of different natures, such as the IT revolution, capital account liberalization, deregulation of financial sectors and cross-national expansion of huge financial institutions.
