This work tests the predictions of Sutton’s model of independent submarkets for the Italian retail banking industry. In the first part of this paper, I develop a model of endogenous mergers to evidence the relationship between firms’ conduct, market entry and market structure. In the second...

Penalized splines (P-splines) and individual random effects are used for the analysis of spatial count data. P-splines are represented as mixed models to give a unified approach to the model estimation procedure. First, a model where the spatial variation is modelled by a two-dimensional...