The U.S. banking industry has been characterized by intense merger activity in the absence of economies of scale and scope. We claim that the loosening of geographic constraints on U.S. banks is responsible for this consolidation process, irrespective of value-maximizing motives. We demonstrate...

We show that for any market-clearing price, average profits in a symmetric industry cannot exceed the individual profits from the Walrasian output. This immediately implies that a firm itself can guarantee to beat the market by producing the Walrasian output. This property clarifies and...

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...

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...