Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the outcome of European Union (EU) deregulation and competition policies on the competitive conditions of the main EU banking markets. Design/methodology/approach – After a review of deregulation and competitition policies in the EU banking...

Outlines previous research on the efficiency of the Italian banking system, describes the structure of Italian banking groups and uses parametric (stochastic cost frontier) and non‐parametric (data envelopment analysis) approaches to assess the efficiency of Italian bank conglomerates in 1995...

Purpose – This paper aims to compare the cost efficiencies across bank‐and market‐based EU countries for the different groups of commercial, savings and co‐operative banks; and between listed and non‐listed banking institutions. In addition, it attempts to determine any potential...