The consolidation of banks around the world in recent years is intensifying public policy debates on the influences of concentration and competition on the performance of banks. In light of these developments, this paper first reviews the existing literature on the impact of bank concentration...

We calculate optimal monetary policy rules for several variants of a simple optimizing model of the monetary transmission mechanism with sticky prices and/or wages. We show that robustly optimal rules can be represented by interest-rate feedback rules that generalize the celebrated proposal of...