The consolidation process that characterized the banking industry in the last decades has been widely analyzed, but very few studies have investigated what are the reasons why a number of announced deals were not concluded. We fill this gap in the literature analyzing the characteristics of...

Are the drivers of domestic and cross-border M&As in the banking sector different? Despite the intense research on bank M&As in the last decade, the attention paid to this issue is surprisingly limited. We fill this gap studying the ex-ante determinants of national and international acquisitions...

What drives bankers to create larger and larger, often multinational banking groups? In this paper we investigate whether the targets in cross-border bank M&As are materially different from those banks targeted in domestic M&A deals. The main message of this paper is that, with few exceptions,...

The paper compares the essential features of the Italian banking system with those of the other large euro-area countries. The analysis focuses on banks? size, ownership and competitiveness, their role in financing firms, the composition of their balance sheets and their degree of...

Trade theory traces back different patterns of internationalization to heterogeneity between firms, measured both through differences in productivity levels and size. In this paper we analyze the link between heterogeneity within sectors and internationalization choices, namely trade and foreign...

We study the performance of the so called Made in Italy agri-food exports over the last fifteen years, merging the strand of analysis that estimated price and demand elasticities with that considering more explicitly the role of product quality. We proceed in three steps. First, we estimate the...

Endogenous growth has set a new paradigm for macroeconomic analysis. This paper overviews the most relevant theoretical contributions of this literature for the analysis of open economies, highlighting their implications both for the effects of crosscountry integration on output convergence and...

This paper investigates the determinants of the pattern of banks' foreign investment. We extended previous analyses in three directions. First, we use a unique database that includes information on 260 large banks from OECD countries and all their foreign branches and subsidiaries in each one of...

In the past fifteen years, cross-border mergers and acquisitions have had an ever increasing role in the process of bank internationalization. Although a consensus view has developed on the determinants of a bank’s decision to expand abroad and on the determinants of the patterns of expansion,...

This paper investigates what factors might help explain the internationalization strategy of banks and insurance companies, by comparing the determinants of cross-border M&As in the two sectors in a unified framework. The empirical analysis shows that between 1990 and 2003 the...