Over the last ten years there have been great strides made in the analysis of the regional structure of banking systems and financial integration both from the theoretical and empirical point of view. Experience shows that the financial structure tends to be hierarchical with an advanced...

Bank deregulation and progress in information technology altered the geographical diffusion of banking structures and instruments, and reduced operational distance between banks and local economies. Although, the consolidation of the banking industry promoted the geographical concentration of...

In the next few years, the Italian financial system will face the challenges of an increasingly competitive environment. The need for change is however constrained by the traditional structure of the Italian economy (with large numbers of small firms and marked regional disparities). This paper...

In this paper we analyze the new geography of the Italian banking system that has arisen after the integration of banking structures in recent years. The analysis of the evolution of the banking system is based on the concept of distance. In particular, we do not only refer to the traditional...

In the early 1990s, a widely-shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to drastically decrease over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility....