Financial institutions are connected to each other by a series of bilateral transactions. In normal times, institutions' connections may result in efficient risk transfer. But in crises, connections can facilitate contagion - as initial problems lead to chains of defaults and liquidity shortages...

Theory makes ambiguous predictions about the relationship between market structure and competitiveness of the banking system and banking sector stability. Empirical studies focusing on individual countries provide similarly ambiguous results, while cross-country studies point mostly to a...