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 …

Outright bank failures without prior indication of financial instability are very rare. Supervisory authorities monitor … regarded as troubled to varying degrees before outright closure. But to our knowledge virtually all studies that predict bank … failures neglect the ordinal nature of bank distress. Exploiting the distress database of the Deutsche Bundesbank we …

spread of a bank by about two basis points. We further find that some banks have already reached a size that makes them too …