This paper seeks to discover the level and spread of bank efficiency in the EU, which in the light of the current and expected increase in competition in Europe is of vital importance for welfare- related public policy toward market structure and conduct. In particular, this study focuses on...

The proposed risk sensitive minimum requirements of the new Basel capital accord have raised concerns about possible (acceleration of) procyclical behaviour of banking, which might threaten macroeconomic stability. This paper analyses the interaction between business cycles and bank behaviour...

This paper examines competitive conditions and market structure in the banking industry, and investigates their interrelationship. Competition is measured using the non-structural Panzar-Rosse model, which assesses the elasticities of interest revenues with respect to changes in banks' input...

The current debate on the possible procyclicality of the new Basel Accord pays little attention to the procyclicality created by unsound loan loss provisioning. This paper investigates how bank provisioning behaviour is related to the business cycle, using 8,000 bank-year observations from 29...

This paper examines competitive conditions and market structure in the banking industry, and inves- tigates their interrelationship. Competition is measured using the non-structural Panzar-Rosse model, which assesses the elasticities of interest revenues with respect to changes in banks' input...

This paper analyses the impact of loan market competition on the interest rates applied by euro area banks to loans and deposits during the 1994-2004 period, using a novel measure of competition called the Boone indicator. We find evidence that stronger competition implies significantly lower...

This paper is the first that applies a recently introduced measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of competition can consider the entire...