The recent banking sector shakeup in Ghana resulted in a wave of bank failures, leading to mergers and consolidations of several banks. This study analyses the financial performance of commercial banks before the crises of the banking sector in 2017. Four out of the affected banks were selected...

The inability of most bank merger studies to control for hidden bailouts may lead to biased results. In this study, we employ a unique data set of approximately 1,000 mergers to analyze the determinants of bank mergers. We use data on the regulatory intervention history to distinguish between...

In this paper we employ a novel identification scheme to show the causal effect of negative shocks to banks on the real economy. The identification is based on exploiting distressed mergers of German savings banks. We show that these mergers represent exogenous shocks to the (initially...