We propose a spatial competition model to study banks' strategic responses to the asymmetric Spanish geographic deregulation process. We find that once the geographic deregulation process finishes, inter-regional mergers between savings banks are optimal whenever the economies of scale...

Recent cross-country comparisons of bank efficiency have been based on pooled estimates of banks across countries and have typically assumed a common frontier and that differences in performance among banks are primarily due to disparities in certain country-specific aspects of banking...

In this paper we used the procedures developed in the Kumar and Russell (2002) growth-accounting study to examine cross-country growth during the 1990's. Using a data set comprising developed, newly industrialized, developing and transitional economies, we decomposed the growth of output per...