We investigate the effects of competition in the banking sector on the creation of firms in the non-financial sector, explicitly allowing for heterogeneous effects across borrowers characterized by different degrees of asymmetric information. We find evidence of a bellshaped relationship between...

We use Italian data on bank lending to firms to study the transmission of shocks affecting bank balance sheets to the volume and cost of credit granted to business borrowers and to the probability of banks accepting loan applications from new borrowers during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The...

Consolidation in the banking industry of many countries has reduced the number of small banks and led to significant shifts in market shares; deregulation has fostered entry in local credit markets and branch expansion, which in turn have increased competition. Small businesses are believed to...

We empirically investigate the relevance of demand-side complementarity between electronic and traditional provision of banking services. Since no systematic data on prices for the two types of services is available, it is not possible to estimate cross-elasticities of demand. We resort to two...

A large literature on the effects of bank consolidation focuses on direct efficiency gains for participating banks and market power effects. The special nature of credit markets suggests that indirect informational effects for borrowers may be generated by bank consolidation. In particular,...