What are borders made of? An analysis of barriers to European banking integration

Massimiliano Affinito and Matteo Piazza ()
Additional contact information
Matteo Piazza: Banca d'Italia

No 666, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: Linguistic and cultural differences, different legal and supervisory frameworks, relationship lending have been repeatedly mentioned as barriers to European retail banking integration. We investigate whether these barriers have affected integration within national boundaries, using an index of localism of regional banking systems as a measure of market integration. If local banks are established and flourish because asymmetric information makes entry difficult for non-incumbents (Dell�Ariccia, 2001) or regulatory and governance rules prevent entry from outside (Berger et al., 1995), we should find a significant relationship between indicators of these barriers and measures of the localism of banking systems. Our results show that this is indeed the case for asymmetric information, while findings are more blurred for supervisory practices.

Keywords: banking integration; barriers; asymmetric information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cfn, nep-eec, nep-fmk and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/temi-disc ... 0666/en_tema_666.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: What Are Borders Made of? An Analysis of Barriers to European Banking Integration (2009)
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:bdi:wptemi:td_666_08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().