European banking landscape between diversity, competition and concentration

The new issue of the Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung 4/2018 (Quarterly Journal of Economic Research) on European banking landscape between diversity, competition and concentration is now available.

Causes and consequences of institutional diversity are a largely neglected issue in economics. Only in finance, institutional variety has been at times acknowledged, though not in its ‘institution-free’ neoclassical version. Still, extant research has primarily focused on the juxtaposition of bank- vs. market-based financial systems. Given the strong interconnectedness between banks and markets, this is for sure a too binary perspective. Differential responses to the Great Financial Crisis have highlighted the pertinence of institutional diversity for the performance as well as resilience of (national) financial systems. Nonetheless, financial diversity is still poorly researched and underestimated. In order to motivate more research on the role of banking sector and financial intermediary diversity for the performance of economies and societies, we review recent research in this area and present empirical findings.

Content of the Quarterly Journal:

• Hans-Helmut Kotz and Dorothea Schäfer
  European banking landscape between diversity, competition and concentration
• Reinhard H. Schmidt
  Diversity in finance: An overview
• Giovanni Ferri and Doris Neuberger
  How does banking diversity fit in the general vision inspiring the joint process of Banking Union and Capital Markets Union?
• Horst Gischer and Christian Ilchmann
  Banking sector diversity and socioeconomic structure—criteria for matching pairs
• Andreas Bley
  Limited diversity—business models of German cooperative banks
• Franz Flögel and Stefan Gärtner
  Lost diversity: Business lending in the centralised banking system of the UK
• Karl-Peter Schackmann-Fallis and Mirko Weiß
  Post-financial crisis times: Only a short phase of re-intermediation and re-direction to boring banking business models? Regulatory burden, fintech competition and concentration processes
• Mechthild Schrooten
  Finance and growth—reconsidered
• Axel Bertuch-Samuels
  Why we should embrace institutional diversity in banking
• Lorenzo Bini Smaghi
  What future for the European banking system?
• Hans-Helmut Kotz and Dorothea Schäfer
  Diversity across EU banking sectors: Poorly researched and underappreciated