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Merger and acquisitions (M&As) have been an important tool for reorganizing the European market since the establishment of European Economic and Monetary Union. This paper suggests that European integration helped and encouraged European firms to source technology across national borders in Europe, establishing European innovative firms. The figures confirm that, once barriers impeding the free movement of capital, goods and labor had fallen, European firms used M&As intensively to enter foreign European markets. Enhancing technology competencies is found to be one of the main motives for cross-border acquisitions in the 1990s but is not a factor in domestic acquisitions over the same period.

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We investigate how the lending activities of a multinational bank's affiliates located abroad are affected by funding difficulties in view of the financial crisis. For this, we consider transaction-induced changes in long-term lending to the private sector of 40 countries by the affiliates of the 68 largest German banks. We find that affiliates' local deposits and profitability have been stabilizing loan supply. By contrast, relying on short-term wholesale funding has increasingly proven to be a disadvantage in the crisis, as inter-bank and capital markets froze. Besides, the more an affiliate abroad takes recourse to intra-bank funding in the crisis, the more it becomes dependent on a stable deposit and long-term wholesale funding position of its parent bank. We furthermore detect competition for intra-bank funding across the affiliates abroad as well as an increasing focus on the parent bank's home market activities.