Playing yo-yo with bank competition: New evidence from 1890 to 2014

Credit Expansion, Leverage, and Banking Distress: The Puzzle of Interwar Italy

“…29 Considering only ordinary joint-stock banks, these were 192 before WWI, 219 in 1918WWI, 219 in , 343 in 1923WWI, 219 in , and reached a peak of 427 in 1927. With all these new banks entering the market in the early 1920s, it is not difficult to make sense of the findings of De Bonis et al (2018) that banking competition reached a historical peak in the 1920s. Polsi (2000) highlights that whereas a process of concentration had started before WWI, this was reversed after WWI and the collapse of the Banca di Sconto in 1921, this dynamic being evident looking at the concentration of total assets measured with the Herfindahl index for joint-stock banks (table 3).…”