Merger Control as Barrier to EU Banking Market Integration

Matthias Koehler

No 07-082, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: In 2005, the President of the Bank of Italy blocked the cross-border acquisition of two Italian banks for ?prudential reasons and formal errors?. Following these events, the EU Commission brought actions against Italy for infringement of the principle of the free movement of capital. Although there is anecdotal evidence that prudential control may constitute a barrier to cross-border M&A in the banking sector, empirical evidence is missing until now. The main problem is the lack of data on the scope for politicians and supervisors to block M&A in the banking sector. The main contribution of this paper is to measure this scope for interference by constructing indices on the political independence and the transparency and strength of the supervisory review process of bank M&A. The main source of information to construct these indices is a questionnaire on banking regulation that was sent to the supervisory authorities in the 25 EU member countries between October 2006 and March 2007.

Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-com, nep-eec, nep-ind and nep-reg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/24667/1/dp07082.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:zbw:zewdip:7006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().