During the last decades there has been a widespread relaxation of legal entry barriers into the banking industry, with potential benefits for financial integration and competition. Obstacles to banks' geographical and business expansion have been removed and branching has been substantially...

We examine how banking supervisors affect credit at the local level by charging fines to individual banks. Using a macro approach to capture the direct effect on the fined bank and the indirect effect on the other banks operating in the local credit market, we estimate reputational, reallocation...