During the crisis the financial system experienced a concentration process driven by new M&A released by both big and medium banks. The article evaluates the role of banking features and regulatory framework in explaining the probability to be a target firm in a domestic or cross border M&A....

This paper investigates whether M&A operations influence the performance of banks. Using a sample of 714 deals involving EU acquirers and targets located throughout the world over the period 1991-2005, we investigate whether M&A operations are associated with improved performance (using both...

During the past decades, competitive pressures have increasingly driven banks to change the strategic focus on generating returns to shareholders. All things being equal, cost efficient banks should be more profitable and therefore generate greater shareholder returns. The purpose of this paper...

This paper investigates the influence of environmental variables on the cost efficiency of the UK and Italian investment firms over the period 1995-1998, by employing four different specifications of the stochastic frontier methodology using a translog cost function in order to measure...

The efficiency of European investment firms' industries addresses the differentiation issue, which is investigated connecting an institutional perspective to microeconomic productivity literature. The effort is to combine macro- and micro-perspectives in the empirical analysis of a cross-country...

This paper investigates the role of off-balance sheet securitization on US bank leverage pro-cyclicality. Effective leverage (taking into account off-balance sheet securitization) is especially relevant for the US, where GAAP accounting rules for securitization allowed until 2009 a...

Recent competitive pressures have progressively driven banks to strategically focus on generating returns to shareholders. Therefore, the investigation of the determinants of bank performance and their relationship with share prices has become increasingly important. This paper extends the...

This paper investigates the determinants associated with the likelihood of a bank becoming involved in a merger or an acquisition. Using a multinomial logistic regression and a Cox regression with time-dependent covariates, we investigate the determinants of being a target or an acquirer from a...