Economic integration on the EU banking markets is expected to favor competition, which should provide economic gains. However, even if there is a commonly accepted view in favor of enhanced bank competition during the last decade, no study has been performed in the 2000s showing this trend. In...

This paper investigates the motive of geographic risk diversification in the lending activity for bank mergers in the EU on a sample of large banking groups. Geographic diversification should allow banks to reduce their risk. We observe that the loan portfolios of European banks are home-biased....

Economic integration on the EU banking markets is expected to favor competition. However no study has been performed in the 2000s showing this trend. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by measuring the evolution of bank competition in all EU countries during the 2000s with the Lerner index...