During the crisis the financial system experienced a concentration process driven by new M&A released by both big and medium banks. The article evaluates the role of banking features and regulatory framework in explaining the probability to be a target firm in a domestic or cross border M&A....

This paper explores the ability of financial analysts to gauge the risk taken by banks and investigates the impact of the recent financial crisis. Using a sample of 36,343 analyst forecasts issued for 411 European banks over 2003-2009 we find that analyst forecasts are influenced by risk, the...

Detecting whether banks' leverage is indeed procyclical is relevant to support the view that booms and crises may be reinforced by some sort of supply side financial accelerator, whilst finding a plausible explanation of banks' behaviour is crucial to trace the road for a sensible reform of...

This paper studies earnings management and forecast guidance activities of European banks between 2004 and 2008. Using 22,564 analyst forecasts for 55 banks we find that the proportion of banks hitting or beating analyst consensus fell from 68.22% pre-crisis to 28.13% during the crisis. Banks...

During the past decades, competitive pressures have increasingly driven banks to change the strategic focus on generating returns to shareholders. All things being equal, cost efficient banks should be more profitable and therefore generate greater shareholder returns. The purpose of this paper...

This paper investigates the level of economies of scale, as well as their determinants, for 103 European listed banks over the period 2000-2011 by employing a Stochastic Frontier Approach. The results reveal that economies of scale are widespread and move together for all size classes, although...

This paper investigates the influence of environmental variables on the cost efficiency of the UK and Italian investment firms over the period 1995-1998, by employing four different specifications of the stochastic frontier methodology using a translog cost function in order to measure...

The efficiency of European investment firms' industries addresses the differentiation issue, which is investigated connecting an institutional perspective to microeconomic productivity literature. The effort is to combine macro- and micro-perspectives in the empirical analysis of a cross-country...