taking place for retail banking. Data on cross-border retail bank flows, cross-border bank mergers and the law of one price … reveal no evidence of integration in retail banking. This paper shows that the previous tests of bank integration are weak in … that they are not based on an equilibrium concept and are neither necessary nor sufficient statistics for bank integration …

A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization … indeed increases bank efficiency. Second, building on these results, we examine the relation between the Boone indicator … bank soundness. We find evidence that competition robustly increases bank soundness, via the efficiency channel …