This paper examines the relationship between competition policies and policies to preserve stability in the banking sector. Market structures and the relative importance of the three classical antitrust areas for banking are discussed, showing the predominance of merger review considerations for...

An unprecedented process of financial consolidation has taken place in the European Union over the past decade. Building on earlier US evidence, we examine the impact of strategic similarities between bidders and targets on post-merger financial performance. We find that, on average, bank...

The paper investigates small business lending as an information problem. It models the effects of information asymmetries within the bank combined with fixed wages. Two kinds of inefficiencies arise in equilibrium: the credit officer either sometimes shirks or he is occasionally fired. In both...

This paper analyzes the effects of bank mergers on bank firm relationships. Using matched bank-firm level data, I find that mergers disrupt lending relationships, specially to small borrowers of target banks. However, I find significant positive effects of mergers for borrowers that continue the...

We study the effect of interbank market integration on small firm finance in the build-up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. We use a comprehensive data set that contains contract terms on individual loans to 6,047 firms across 14 European countries between 1998:01 and 2005:12. We account for...

The increasing pervasiveness of technology-driven firms that offer banking services has led to a growing pressure on traditional banks to modernize their core business activities. Banks attempt to confront the challenges of digitalization by cooperating with financial technology firms (fintechs)...

This paper describes the trends in foreign bank ownership across the world and presents, for the first time, empirical evidence of the causes of multinational banks' exits from other countries. Using panel data for 149 closed or divested foreign bank subsidiaries across 54 countries from 1997 to...

A puzzling but consistent result in the empirical literature on banking is that firms with close bank ties do not grow faster than bank-independent firms. In this paper, we reconsider the link between relationship lending and firms' growth, distinguishing firms by size and 'health'. The idea is...

We analyze the microeconomic determinants of cross-border bank acquisitions in 16 transition economies over the period 1996-2006. By using a latent class discrete choice model we explicitly incorporate the macroeconomic and institutional heterogeneity of the transition economies into our...

In this paper we study top executive turnover in Italian Banks over the period 1993-2001. We relate the probability of survival of top executives (Presidents, CEOs and General Managers) to bank performance and the manager's local connections, controlling for (observable and unobservable) bank...