Publications

Over the last twenty years, the Spanish banking industry has been deeply reshaped in several respects. One of the features that has allowed this has been the geographic expansion of most savings banks, which have been expanding into other regions (different from their regions of origin) at a significant pace since 1989. Almost simultaneously, the Spanish economy has grown at remarkable annual rates, a growth pattern which came to an abrupt halt in 2008. Under these circumstances, this paper analyzes the geographic expansion patterns of Spanish financial institutions during the post-deregulation period. This goal extends previous analyses in two main ways, considering a broader set of variables affecting bank branch location, and using a quantile regression in order to obtain results which go beyond conditional mean models. Results indicate: (i) location and geographic diversification patterns vary mostly across firms and by type of firm; (ii) the evaluation of growth and financial development at municipal level indicates that some communities have experienced financial exclusion; (iii) it is difficult to establish a linear relationship to explain bank branch geographic diversification strategies.