The inability of most bank merger studies to control for hidden bailouts may lead to biased results. In this study, we … employ a unique data set of approximately 1,000 mergers to analyze the determinants of bank mergers. We use data on the …

different banks as being best or worst performers. Our main conclusion is that efficiency studies in general and bank efficiency …

on bank credit and as they represent the vast majority of the corporate sector reduced credit availability for those …-sized enterprises (SME). We measure the financing opportunities of SMEs based on the bank debt/assets ratio and the logarithmized credit … size and control both explicitly for bank mergers and for the increase in the average bank size in the course of the …