Community banks have long played an important role in the U.S. economy, providing loans and other financial services to households and small businesses within their local markets. In recent years, technological and legal developments, as well as changes in the business strategies of larger banks...

In this paper, we examine the role of market characteristics in explaining the much discussed phenomenon of growth in the number of banking institution branches over time, and the much less discussed phenomenon of decline in the size of the average branch. We note first that substitution of bank...

Incompatibility across rival systems can influence incentives to invest in product changes beneficial to the consumer. We investigate this phenomenon in the case of bank ATM networks, where the number of ATM locations is a measure of product quality and surcharge fees serve as an index of...