This paper analyses the relation between competition and concentration in a monopolistic competition model where banks … Italy and France using a maximum likelihood approach to derive a measure of the degree of competition in each local market …. We propose an empirical test to evaluate ex-ante the impact of horizontal mergers on this measure. Depending on the pre-merger …

bank merger would reduce competition. Over the past two decades, however, changes in bank regulation and market structure … “too big to fail” banks.This Article contends that regulators' current approach to evaluating bank merger proposals is … that such deals could harm consumers and destabilize financial markets. This Article asserts that contemporary bank merger …

estimated measures of competition quantifies the impact of the merger. We apply our test to French and Italian mergers …We propose a new test to evaluate the impact of horizontal mergers on competition in the banking industry. The test is … and interest rates and consists in comparing the estimated degree of competition in the status- quo, where branching …