We offer a new explanation for why academic studies typically fail to find value creation in bank mergers. Our conjectures are predicated on the idea that, until recently, large bank acquisitions were a new phenomenon, with no best practices history to inform bank managers or market investors....

We derive five hypotheses regarding market competition, price, and advertising from a theoretical model of a profit maximizing depository institution, and test these conjectures in a simultaneous system of deposit interest rates and advertising expenditures for a data panel of 1,867 thrift...