Over the last twenty years, the Spanish banking industry has been deeply reshaped in several respects. One of the features that has allowed for it has been the geographic expansion of most savings banks, which could not enter other markets different from their natural market before 1989. Since...

We propose a spatial competition model to study banks' strategic responses to the asymmetric Spanish geographic deregulation process. We find that once the geographic deregulation process finishes, inter-regional mergers between savings banks are optimal whenever the economies of scale...