In 2005, the President of the Bank of Italy blocked the cross-border acquisition of two Italian banks for prudential reasons and formal errors. Because it became later public that both deals were not blocked for prudential reasons, but to protect domestic banks from foreign investors. A survey...

This paper analyses the relation between competition and concentration in the banking sector. The empirical answer is given by testing a monopolistic competition model of bank branching behaviour on individual bank data at county level (départements and provinces) in France and Italy. We...