The paper identifies the business models followed by banks in the euro area, utilising a proprietary dataset collected in the context of the supervisory reporting of the Single Supervisory Mechanism. The concept of a 'business model' has been neglected by economic theory and is defined here with...

This paper complements the existing scarce literature on financial cooperatives in various ways. First, we describe the background and evolution of European Cooperative Banking Groups (ECBGs). Second, we summarize the main reasons for the past disregard and recent revaluation of the cooperative...

This paper explores the effects of bank credit on firm growth before and after the recent financial crisis outbreak, taking into account different structural characteristics of the banking sector and the domestic economy. The econometric method of panel quantiles is used on a large sample of...

Banks perform similar functions all over the world. Nevertheless, the banking systems around the world are very different. This paper analyses how the difference affects local firms as well as small and medium-sized enterprises. For my project, I combine banking and economic data of five EU...

Transaction cost shocks in financial markets are known to affect asset prices. This paper analyses how changes in transaction costs may affect the value of assets that banks use to collateralise borrowings in monetary policy operations. Based on a simple asset pricing model and employing a...

Failure in bank corporate governance has been seen as a contributing factor to excessive risk-taking pre-crisis with devastating implications as risks realised during the financial crisis. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence on the impact of managerial incentives on bank crisis performance is...

We investigate whether European banks use commission and fee income to smooth reported earnings or to persistently increase reported earnings as an income-increasing earnings management strategy. We find that European banks use commission and fee income to smooth reported earnings and this...

We investigate the trade-off between financial stability and competition policy by focusing on the merger of ABN AMRO and Fortis Bank NL in the Dutch retail banking market. The financial crisis delayed the completion of the merger giving rise to anti-competitive behavior in the transitory...

Our aim is to empirically assess differences in behaviour and performance of European cooperative and commercial banks in a low interest rate environment. We employ dynamic panel data methods to assess the relative performance of both ownership structures based on a data set of nearly 1,000...

We analyze a large merger in the Dutch banking market during the financial crisis using disaggregated data. Based on a merger simulation model, we evaluate merger-induced changes in the interest rates for savings accounts. We find that the merging banks decreased interest rates by 3 to 5 percent...