Motivated by the liberalisation and harmonisation of financial systems in Europe, we investigate whether the observed shift into non-interest income activities improves performance of small European credit institutions. Using a sample of 755 small banks for the period 1997–2003, we find no...

How do concentration and competition in the European banking sector affect lending relationships between small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and their banks? Recent empirical evidence suggests that concentration and competition capture different characteristics of banking systems. Using a...

Motivated by the liberalisation and harmonisation of financial systems in Europe, we investigate whether the observed shift into non-interest income activities improves performance of small European credit institutions. Using a sample of 755 small banks for the period 1997-2003, we find no...

Motivated by the liberalisation and harmonisation of financial systems in Europe, we investigate whether the observed shift into non-interest income activities improves performance of small European credit institutions. Using a sample of 755 small banks for the period 1997-2003, we find no...

Using the Panzar and Rosse H-statistic as a measure of competition in 45 countries, we find that more competitive banking systems are less prone to experience a systemic crisis and exhibit increased time to crisis. This result holds even when we control for banking system concentration, which is...