A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization based approach to large data sets for European and U.S. banks, we offer new empirical evidence that efficiency plays a key role in the transmission from competition to soundness....

We examine the effect of competition on banking stability using a new measure of competition based on the reallocation of profits from inefficient banks to efficient ones (Boone, 2008). Examining a sample of European banks, we show that this measure does capture competition, that competition is...

We investigate how government interventions such as blanket guarantees, liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations affect banking competition. This issue is critical for stability, access to finance, and economic growth. Exploiting cross-country and cross-time variation in the...