Reforms of financial regulation after the crisis of 2007-2009 raise the question of what is the relation between financial regulators and competition authorities. Should competition authorities play a role in financial regulation? Should they co-operate with financial regulators? Or should they...

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...

Governments throughout the world responded to the financial crisis of 2008-2009 by granting massive bailouts to their largest and most interconnected banks. In most jurisdictions, financial stability took precedence over all other policy concerns, which meant that competition policy was...

There is still little consensus on the effectiveness of business support policies. The empirical evaluation is complicated by the difficulty in achieving reliable identification. We analyse the impact of Law 488/92, the main Italian regional policy. We propose a new approach, named multiple...

The paper analyses the causal effect of capital subsidies on firms' efficiency and productivity by exploiting the conditions for a local random experiment created by Law 488/92 (henceforth L488), which has been an important policy instrument for reducing territorial disparities in Italy. The...