Although recent experiences made during the ongoing international financial crisis call for smaller entities in banking systems, consolidation still takes place in many industrialized economies. The often stretched argument that large banks are able to establish economies of scale as well as...

Our paper addresses the economic concept of inflation, and how to measure inflation properly in practise. First of all we present and discuss comprehensively various definitions of inflation proposed and used in the literature. What follows, is a detailed investigation of empirical proxies or...

Die Cost-Income-Ratio (CIR) ist zutiefst im Verständnis der Banking Community wie auch der Wissenschaft als geeigneter Produktivitätsindikator verwurzelt. Gleichwohl impliziert die Messung einer Wert- anstelle einer Mengenrelation von Input und Output eine mögliche Verzerrung durch...

Our paper calls attention to the heterogeneous levels of competition in EMU banking systems. Employing a modified Lerner Index, our methodically unique data set enables us to calculate banks’ pricing power in the national lending business alone, instead of measuring market power for banks’...