On the evolution of the Italian bank branch distribution

Alberto Russo

Economics Bulletin, 2009, vol. 29, issue 3, 2063-2078

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of institutional change on the evolution of the Italian bank branch distribution. As a consequence of the “liberalisation” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, banks were free to open new branches in their preferred locations, without the administrative control of the Bank of Italy operational until 1989. Another major consequence of the regime change has been a significant wave of consolidation events among banks. Our hypothesis is that these fundamental changes can account for the emergence of a power law tail as the outcome of self-organisation in a deregulated environment. From a methodological point of view, we follow a “systemic” approach with a focus on statistical properties of bank branch distribution identifying the banks' collective reaction to the changing institutional setting.

Keywords: branch banking dynamics; institutional change; collective phenomena; power law distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 G2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-08-21
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2009/Volume29/EB-09-V29-I3-P56.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-09-00072

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley (j.p.conley@vanderbilt.edu).