Under the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) introduced in 2014, the European Central Bank directly supervises significant euro area banks, which hold about 82% of total banking assets. We find that this important supervisory change has positive effects on the return on assets and the return on...

This paper investigates how the ownership and the procedure for the selection of firms operating in the local public transport sector affect their productivity. In order to compare different institutional regimes, we carry out a comparative analysis of 72 companies operating in large European...

The purpose of this paper is to represent in which way a stable and no negligible growth in demand can affect the level of sustainability of collusion. For the European Commission this assumption is seen as a factor that disincentives collusion and pushes to a competitive behavior. This fact...

Although the United States and the European Union were both seriously impacted by the financial crisis of 2007, the resulting policy debates and regulatory responses have differed considerably on the two sides of the Atlantic. In this paper the authors examine the debates on the problem posed by...

Bank stability is an important aspect of financial stability, especially in bank-centric systems such as those in Southeast Europe. The financial crisis has shown that there is a particular need to monitor credit and other similar risks. Hence, it is important to analyse risks affecting the...

This paper studies the links between competition in the lending market and spreads of bank loans in Brazil. Evidence from a dataset of more than 13 million loan-level observations from private banks shows a positive relationship between market power, measured by the Lerner index, and the cost of...

European Union countries offer a unique experience of financial regulatory and supervisory integration, complementing various other European integration efforts following the second world war. Financial regulatory and supervisory integration was a very slow process before 2008, despite...

This EIF Working Paper investigates financing patterns of European SMEs by looking at a large number of different financing instruments and their complementary and substitutive effects, using the SAFE dataset collected in 2015. We develop an empirical taxonomy of SME financing patterns in...

The design of lender-of-last-resort interventions can exacerbate the bank-sovereign nexus. During sovereign crises, central bank provision of long-term liquidity incentivizes banks to purchase high yield eligible collateral securities matching the maturity of the central bank loans. Using unique...