Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? In this paper, we develop a theory of granularity (Gabaix, 2011) for the banking sector, introducing Bertrand competition and heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using this framework, we show conditions under which...

We explore the impact of large banks and of financial openness for aggregate growth. Large banks matter because of granular effects: if markets are very concentrated in terms of the size distribution of banks, idiosyncratic shocks at the bank-level do not cancel out in the aggregate but can...

Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This study tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. Using a novel dataset that contains all German banks'...

This paper studies the sectoral and geographical dimensions of the response of bank lending to sectoral growth. We use several bank-level datasets provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank for the 1996-2002 period. Our results show that bank heterogeneity affects how lending responds to domestic...