The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...

In this paper, we develop an information theory-based framework about cross-border acquisitions in the financial intermediation industry. We argue that even though “soft” information embedded in customer relationships of local banks can, in principle, help multinational banks (MNBs) overcome...