Closed-End funds cover approximately 40% of the Investment Funds, in the world market, that reached US dollars 11,7 trillion at the end of 2002. The market is captured by the US and EU Investment Funds that cover almost 95% of total assets. Existing since 1868, Closed-End Funds offer most of the...

Throughout the Fall 2007 and into the new year 2008 private equity firms repeatedly attempted to terminate pending acquisitions. The litigation surrounding these purported terminations and heightened scrutiny directed upon the terms of private equity agreements opened a revealing window on a...

This article designs a framework for evaluating the causes, consequences, and future implications of financial services industry consolidation, reviews the extant research literature within the context of this framework (over 250 references), and suggests fruitful avenues for future research....

Despite recent innovations that might have reduced banks' reliance on brick-and-mortar branches for distributing retail financial services, the number of U.S. bank branches has continued to increase steadily over time. Further, an increasing percentage of these branches are held by banks with...

This paper estimates a structural demand model for commercial bank deposit services. Following the discrete choice literature, consumer decisions are based on prices and bank characteristics. The results, based on the US for 1993-1999, indicate that, with respect to prices, consumers respond to...

We study the effects of structural changes in banking markets on the supply of credit to small businesses. Specifically, we examine whether bank mergers and acquisitions (Mamp;As) and entry have quot;externalquot; effects on small business loans by other banks in the same local markets. The...

We study the dynamics of market entry following mergers and acquisitions (Mamp;As) using banking industry data. The findings suggest that Mamp;As are associated with significant subsequent increases in the probability of entry and may explain more than 20% of entry in metropolitan markets, and...

The evolution and integration of financial markets in recent decades have created increasing competition among stock exchanges, which are behaving more and more like 'standard' firms. Stock exchanges are peculiar firms that produce listing, trading, and clearing services and 'sell' price...

We investigate how banking market competition, informational opacity, and sensitivity to shocks have changed over the last three decades by examining the persistence of firm-level rents. We develop propagation mechanisms with testable implications to isolate the sources of persistence. Our...

This paper examines the efficiency and price effects of mergers by applying a frontier profit function to data on bank `megamergers'. We find that merged banks experience a statistically significant 16 percentage point average increase in profit efficiency rank relative to other large banks....