Suchergebnisse

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The wide change of banking models over last few decades has led to an increasing share of fee and commission income of banks. In this paper we deal with determinants of banking fees in the European Union with special emphasis on market concentration based on EU-27 data from 2007 to 2012. For the estimation we use System Generalized Method of Moments, which is appropriate for dynamic panel data, allows for time invariant and lagged dependent variables and is able to deal with endogeneity. We conclude that banks facing higher competition tend to expand more aggressively into non-traditional activities and therefore they report higher fee income shares. Moreover, we found that a higher equity to assets ratio is related with higher shares of fee income since by expanding into non-traditional businesses the bank needs more capital to prevent the potential risks of the new activity. Surprisingly, a high deposits to assets ratio tends to increase the fee income share, which may be possibly attributed to relatively high switching costs and to close relationship between depositor and bank in the EU banking sector. However, macroeconomic conditions do not seem to have a significant impact on the net fee and commission income share.

The main goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of key regulatory changes in the European merger control and to evaluate their real impact on the efficiency of merger regulation. Our main contribution is an empirical analysis of a unique representative sample of 161 horizontal mergers covering the final regulatory assessments during the period from 1990 to 2008. We use stock market data to identify those cases where there are discrepancies between the Commission and market evaluation of the merger. The PROBIT model is then used to further investigate the sources of these discrepancies. Our results suggest that the Commission's decisions are not purely explained by the motive of protecting consumer welfare and that other political and institutional factors do play a role in setting policy. We did not find evidence that the Commission protects competitors at the expense of consumers and foreign firms. Moreover, we conclude that the regulatory reform introduced in 2004 has significantly enhanced efficiency of the European merger control. To the authors' best knowledge, this paper is the first study using stock market data to evaluate an impact of the recent EU merger control.

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The regulation of financial markets and banking industry has become one of the most discus- sed topics by both academics and practitioners in recent years. One of the reason is the fact that bank capital requirements play a prominent role in sustaining financial stability. There are different theories that have rivaling predictions about how banks adjust their risk and capital behavior to imposed regulatory constraints. This paper intends to contribute to these discussions as it tries to evaluate regulatory pressure on selected banks around the world in the 2000-2005 period. To our knowledge, we are the first to test and compare the capital and risk behavior of US banks and banks from the EU 15 region in this period. In order to provide our analysis, we estimate a modified version of the simultaneous equations model developed by Shrieves and Dahl. This model analy- zes adjustments in capital and risk at banks when they approach the minimum regulatory capital level. In the model, regulatory pressure is one of the explanatory variables and the dependent variables are changes in risk and capital. There are many methods that can be used to estimate the model; we have chosen the method of two-stage least squares (2SLS) and three-stage least squares (3SLS) estimates in order to test for the robustness of the results. The results indicate that regulatory requirements have the desired effect on bank behavior. We find that both European and US banks close to the minimum regulatory threshold tend to increase their capital adequacy by increasing their capital. Finally, we observe a positive and significant relationship between capital levels and risk exposure for both US and EU banks.