effects of bank regulation and the impact of deregulation. We find that where entry was more restricted the cost of credit was …We use exogenous variation in the degree of restrictions to bank competition across Italian provinces to study both the … increase in bad loans. In provinces where restrictions to bank competition were most severe, the proportion of bad loans after …

effects of bank regulation and the impact of deregulation. We find that where entry was more restricted the cost of credit was …We use exogenous variation in the degree of restrictions to bank competition across Italian provinces to study both the … increase in bad loans. In provinces where restrictions to bank competition were most severe, the proportion of bad loans after …

removing barriers to bank entry on bank competition and economic growth. As governments were not concerned about systemic … stability in this period, we are able to isolate the effects of bank competition from those of state implicit guarantees. We … find that the introduction of free banking laws stimulated the creation of new banks and led to more bank failures. Our …

We use a matching method that constructs synthetic counterfactual states to identify the channels that link bank … deregulation to financial integration, and thereby to economic growth. We document a positive, but conditional, effect of financial …