Why Study Shareholder Value Creation in European Banking?

This book is concerned with the analysis of the relationship between shareholder value and its drivers in European banking markets. One might address the following four questions: 1.Why a book on ‘shareholder value’?2.Is it necessary to have another contribution to the shareholder value debate?3.Why banks?4.Why in Europe? With regard to the first question, shareholder value is currently one of the most widely studied areas in finance.l Shareholder value maximisation has become the primary business goal and performance target for most companies. Although managers and practitioners have traditionally criticised the notion that the objective in decision-making should be to maximise firm value, in the last decade, they have recognised that shareholder-value maximisation is at least an important priority for firms. It is possible to answer the first question by concluding that `shareholder value' is an area of research well-defined, robust and interesting for academics, regulators and practitioners.