In the past few years, the pace of consolidation in the banking industry has accelerated, and combinations between banks and other financial service providers have become increasingly prevalent. In some countries, consolidation has resulted from the need to eliminate weak or problem...

Recent papers have shown conditions under which vertical, mergers can result in anticompetitive foreclosure of unintegrated rivals. These models imply that a necessary but not sufficient condition for anticompetitive foreclosure is that unintegrated rivals are less profitable after a vertical...