The papers in this volume were commissioned with the aim of exploring the significant structural changes in the financial system over the past decade or so and the implications for policy-makers charged with the responsibility of maintaining financial system stability

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? In this paper, we develop a theory of granularity (Gabaix, 2011) for the banking sector, introducing Bertrand competition and heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using this framework, we show conditions under which...

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? Gabaix (2011) shows that idosyncratic shocks can have aggregate effects if the distribution of firm sizes in manufacturing follows a power law distribution. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we expand the theory of granularity...

In this paper, the authors analyze the relationship between banking concentration and financial stability for a sample of 173 developed and developing countries over the period 1980–2011. First, they empirically examined the direct effect of banking concentration on financial stability by...