We address the causes, consequences, and implications of the cross-border consolidation of financial institutions by reviewing several hundred studies, providing comparative international data, and estimating cross-border banking efficiency in France, Germany, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S....

We test some predictions about the effects of technological progress on geographic expansion using data on banks in U.S. multibank holding companies over 1985-1998. Specifically, we test whether over time (a) parental control over affiliate banks has increased, and (b) the agency costs...

Several trends in the financial industry could have weakened the competitiveness of small banks in recent years. Despite those challenges, small banks have grown more rapidly than larger banks over the period from 1985 to 2001, and their profitability has been sustained at high levels. However,...

This paper uses a large sample of individual banking organizations, observed from 1996 to 2003, to investigate the characteristics that made them more likely to be acquired. We use a definition of acquisition that we consider preferable to that used in much of the previous literature, and we...

The paper uses data on the volume outstanding of small business loans from the midyear Call Reports to summarize the nature of small business lending at banks that were involved in mergers between June 1993 and June 1996. Then a model of gradual adjustment by the consolidated bank following the...

The creation of a number of very large and sometimes increasingly complex financial institutions, resulting in part from the on-going consolidation of the financial system, has raised concerns that the degree of systemic risk in the financial system may have increased. We argue that firm...

This paper examines the efficiency and price effects of mergers by applying a frontier profit function to data on bank ``megamergers.'' We find that merged banks experience a statistically significant 16 percentage point average increase in profit-efficiency rank relative to other large banks....

In the United States, antitrust authorities rely heavily on numerical measures of local banking market concentration such as the Herfindahl Hirschmann Index to assess the likely competitive effects of proposed bank mergers and acquisitions. This approach to antitrust enforcement relies on two...