Income-specific estimates of competition in European banking

This paper constitutes a new endeavor of investigating competitive conditions in European banking. Since the vast literature of competition modeling has produced mixed results, the proposed methodology goes one step further in order to investigate the intensity of key effects on bank competition as decomposed into specific bank activities. The sample comprises nine of the most developed banking markets in the European region during the period 2002-2010. The concluding remarks over the explanatory power of traditional collusion, relative market power and efficiency alongside other key controls on bank pricing conduct, provide considerable policy implications.