Switching costs are a leading cause of customer lock-in in banking, reducing the extent of competition and increasing market power in this industry. This paper tries to estimate these costs using a methodology that does not require customer microdata. The estimates obtained here—using bank...

This paper studies the integration of deposit and loan markets, which may be constrained by the geographic dispersion of depositors, borrowers, and banks. This dispersion results in problems of asymmetric information, monitoring and transaction costs, which in turn may prevent deposits from...

We provide a framework for empirical analysis of negotiated-price markets. Using mortgage market data and a search and negotiation model, we characterize the welfare impact of search frictions and quantify the role of search costs and brand loyalty for market power. Search frictions reduce...

This paper analyzes the competitive effects of the Basel II Standard Approach capital requirement regulation on an oligopolistic credit market. We define the general goal of the capital regulation to be the improvement of the banking system's soundness. As in the standard literature, we assume...

Information asymmetries can severely limit cross-border border expansion of banks. When a bank enters a new market, it has incomplete information about potential new clients. Such asymmetries are reduced by credit registers, which distribute financial data on bank clients. We investigate the...

Cooperation among savings and cooperative banks was criticized by the European Commission because of potentially anti-competitive effects. In an industrial economics model of banks taking deposits and giving loans we look at regional demarcation as one of such cooperative practices. There are...

This paper analyses the relation between competition and concentration in the banking sector. The empirical answer is given by testing a monopolistic competition model of bank branching behaviour on individual bank data at county level (départements and provinces) in France and Italy. We...

This paper analyses the concentration of the banking system in Croatia and the impact of concentration on stability of the economic system as a whole over the period since 2002 to 2017. The level of concentration is usually related to the competitiveness of a particular sector, in this case the...

We model the impact of bank mergers on loan competition, banks' reserve holdings and aggregate liquidity. Banks compete in a differentiated loan market, hold reserves against liquidity shocks, and refinance in the interbank market. A merger creates an internal money market that induces financial...

This paper addresses a very European issue, the consolidation of securities trading and settlement infrastructures. In a two-country model, we analyze welfare implications of different types of consolidation. We find that horizontal integration of settlement systems is better than vertical...