network on November 29u009630, 2007, hosted by international bank Santander at its corporate headquarters in Madrid, Spain. In …

We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by … 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger … other banks. Other merger properties, including the size and risk profile of targets, the geographic overlap of merging …

We study the impact on bank merger activity of the strengthening in merger control legislation introduced in Europe … between 1989 and 2004. We find that strengthening merger control increases the abnormal returns on bank target stocks in the … days around the merger announcement by 7 percentage points relative to before the new legislation. We discuss several …