This paper studies the bilateral drivers of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between European banks. Two findings … document that banks use M&A as a device to leverage their expertise rather than to diversify. (i) Following the literature on … matrimonial matching by using a binary logit model, the paper examines how the structure of acquiring banks in terms of …

interlocking. We find that approximately half the banks had at least one connection with another bank through director interlocking …, and that a bank that had connections with other banks was less likely to fail than a bank without a network. The quality … with the profitability of the connected banks. On the other hand, there is no strong evidence of financial contagion …

a dataset of small business financing, we find that mergers of small banks have a negative impact on soft information … acquisition, whereas mergers of large banks have no impact. We also find some evidence that an increase in organizational … information acquisition by small banks. These findings are consistent with the organizational theory that predicts a comparative …

banks which had previously jointly financed the same firm, the share of credit granted to the client by the consolidated … consolidated banks. By contrast, if a firm is in financial distress or located in the South of Italy, diversification is …

This paper studies the bilateral drivers of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between European banks. Two findings … document that banks use M&A as a device to leverage their expertise rather than to diversify. (i) Following the literature on … matrimonial matching by using a binary logit model, the paper examines how the structure of acquiring banks in terms of …

banks which had previously jointly financed the same firm, the share of credit granted to the client by the consolidated … the firm, because after consolidations involving its lending banks, the probability of diversifying the mix of lenders … consolidated banks. Indeed, if the company is geographically close to a branch of its financing bank, or if it belongs to an …

This paper discusses whether there is some evidence in recent literature that banks do obtain economies of scale and … that, although there is no clear evidence that such economies have been reached by the banks, the final cost … neither unequivocal nor asserted a priori. Indeed, M&As can be desirable for banks if the former are expected to increase …