This book aims to provide a thoroughly updated overview and evaluation of the industrial organization of banking. It examines the interplay among bank behaviour, market structure, and regulation from the perspective of a variety of public policy issues, including bank competition and risk, market discipline, antitrust issues, and capital regulation. New to this edition are discussions of the economic foundations of international banking, macroprudential regulation, and international coordination of banking policies. The book can serve as a learning tool and reference for graduate students, academics, bankers, and policymakers with interests in the industrial organization of the banking sector and the impacts of banking regulations.

Wide coverage of different perspectives of banking, the book presents classical microeconomic thoeries of banking, but also covers central banking, financial frictions and banking-macro linkages, banking regulation in theory and practice etc., giving students a rounded picture of the world of banking, and also allowing instructors to design and create their own courses with different emphases A self-contained textbook making “linear” progress through chapters. Banking is all about imperfect market, market failure and frictions, therefore, market friction is the key to making progress throughout the book. Necessary elements from contract theory, game theory, dynamic macroeconomics and mathematical techniques will be provided through boxes and appendices, making the textbook self-contained An up-to-date textbook that presents both state-of-the-art research and the evolving reality, an evidence-based textbook that connects theory and practice.

"The third edition of an essential text on the microeconomic foundations of banking that surveys the latest research in banking theory, with new material that covers recent developments in the field"--

The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation of government economic intervention in broad segments of industry throughout the world. Many industries historically subject to economic price and entry controls have been largely deregulated, including natural gas, trucking, airlines, and commercial banking. However, recent concerns about market power in restructured electricity markets, airline industry instability amid chronic financial stress, and the challenges created by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed commercial banks to participate in investment banking, have led to calls for renewed market intervention. Economic Regulation and Its Reform collects research by a group of distinguished scholars who explore these and other issues surrounding government economic intervention. Determining the consequences of such intervention requires a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of imperfect regulation. Moreover, government interventions may take a variety of forms, from relatively nonintrusive performance-based regulations to more aggressive antitrust and competition policies and barriers to entry. This volume introduces the key issues surrounding economic regulation, provides an assessment of the economic effects of regulatory reforms over the past three decades, and examines how these insights bear on some of today’s most significant concerns in regulatory policy.

We study the effects of a bank's engagement in trading. Traditional banking is relationship-based: not scalable, long-term oriented, with high implicit capital, and low risk (thanks to the law of large numbers). Trading is transactions-based: scalable, shortterm, capital constrained, and with the ability to generate risk from concentrated positions. When a bank engages in trading, it can use its ‘spare’ capital to profitablity expand the scale of trading. However, there are two inefficiencies. A bank may allocate too much capital to trading ex-post, compromising the incentives to build relationships ex-ante. And a bank may use trading for risk-shifting. Financial development augments the scalability of trading, which initially benefits conglomeration, but beyond some point inefficiencies dominate. The deepending of the financial markets in recent decades leads trading in banks to become increasingly risky, so that problems in managing and regulating trading in banks will persist for the foreseeable future. The analysis has implications for capital regulation, subsidiarization, and scope and scale restrictions in banking.

We analyze the employment effects of financial shocks using a rich data set of job contracts, matched with the universe of firms and their lending banks in one Italian region. To isolate the effect of the financial shock we construct a firm-specific time-varying measure of credit supply. The contraction in credit supply explains one fourth of the reduction in employment. This result is concentrated in more levered and less productive firms. Also, the relatively less educated and less skilled workers with temporary contracts are the most affected. Our results are consistent with the cleansing role of financial shocks.

The fourth edition of Industrial Organisation continues to highlight the strong link between the theory and analysis of industrial economics using engaging case studies. It takes students on a journey through the historical development of industrial organisation to the present day with new case studies exploring contemporary issues in business, finance and economics such as: Corporate governance Executive pay Price Wars Cloud computing Barriers to entry in banking Patent infringement Social networking Mergers in the car industry Outsourcing