We study the impact on bank merger activity of the strengthening in merger control legislation introduced in Europe … between 1989 and 2004. We find that strengthening merger control increases the abnormal returns on bank target stocks in the … days around the merger announcement by 7 percentage points relative to before the new legislation. We discuss several …

We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by … 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger … other banks. Other merger properties, including the size and risk profile of targets, the geographic overlap of merging …

branch numbers across countries and the opening and closing of branches, bank fragility and consolidation are surprisingly at … important role than internal processing technology. General bank level factors are more important than local internet access …. Bank internal use of technology appears to be more relevant than use of technology by competitors. While large banks rely …