In the past fifteen years, cross-border mergers and acquisitions 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 determinant of the patterns of expansion, the...

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...

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...

We investigate the causes and consequences of securitisations using a large data set of banks from over 100 world countries between 1991 and 2007, when the financial crisis caused the market to collapse. Our results show that banks were more likely to securitise their assets when they faced...