This paper empirically investigates the effect of government bail-out policies on banks outside the safety net. We construct a measure of bail-out perceptions by using rating information. From there, we construct the market shares of insured competitor banks for any given bank, and analyze the...

This paper empirically examines the role of soft information in the competitive interaction between relationship and transaction banks. Soft information can be interpreted as a private signal about the quality of a firm that is observable to a relationship bank, but not to a transaction bank. We...

This paper investigates the dynamics of the pass-through between market interest rates and bank interest rates in the euro area as a function of cyclical and structural differences in the financial system. We find that overall the speed of adjustment for loans is significantly faster than for...

Most observers have concluded that while money markets and government bond markets are rapidly integrating following the introduction of the common currency in the euro area, there is little evidence that a similar integration process is taking place for retail banking. Data on cross-border...