It is often argued that branching stabilizes banking systems by facilitating diversification of bank portfolios … findings. Using data on national banks from the 1920s and 1930s, we show that branch banking increases competition and forces … strengthening the branch banks themselves. Our empirical results suggest that the effects that branching had on competition were …

1930s to assess the effects of the expansion of large-scale, branch-banking networks on competition and the stability of … banking systems. Using a new database of individual bank balance sheets, income statements, and branch establishment, we … examine the characteristics that made a bank a more likely target of a takeover by a large branching network, how incumbent …

We study bank supervision by combining a theoretical model distinguishing supervision from regulation and a novel … supervision and use the model to interpret the relation between supervisory efforts and bank characteristics observed in the data … proportionally with bank size, suggesting the presence of technological scale economies in supervision. The data also show …