The consolidation process which characterized the banking industry in the last decades has been widely analyzed, but very few studies have investigated the reasons which bring a number of announced deals to failure. We fill this gap in the literature analyzing the characteristics of failed M&A operations in a large sample, including all the major domestic and cross-border deals in the banking sector announced worldwide between 1992 and 2010. The results show that the most important factors which determine the failure of an announced operation are deal specific characteristics, in particular the hostility of the bidder and the presence of multiple potential acquirers. Moreover, lengthier negotiations have a lower probability of success. Contrary to expectations, cross-border operations are more likely to be successfully completed than domestic ones.

What drives bankers to create larger and larger, often multinational banking groups? In this paper we investigate whether the targets in cross-border bank M&As are materially different from those banks targeted in domestic M&A deals. The main message of this paper is that, with few exceptions, domestic and foreign investors target similar banks. In particular, and contrary to what one might expect, bank size does not have a different effect on the probability of being a domestic or a cross-border target, instead it has a positive and highly significant effect in both cases. We find that the main differences between national and international M&As are the characteristics of the countries where the banks operate.

Enforcement actions (sanctions) aim to penalize guilty companies and provide examples to other companies that bad behavior will be penalized. A handful of papers analyze the consequences of sanctions in banking for sanctioned companies, while no papers have investigated the spillover effects on non-sanctioned banks. Focusing on credit-related sanctions, we show the existence of a spillover effect: non-sanctioned banks behave similar to sanctioned banks, depending on their degree of similarity, offloading problematic loans and reducing their lending activity.