Local and Global Agglomeration Patterns in the Banking Sector: The Calm in the Mid of a Storm

Abstract

We compare the spatial agglomeration of banks’ branches in Italy across local areas (as identified by local labor market areas) to that of other services. Banks branches appear to be only weakly spatially agglomerated, their spatial distribution being similar to that of other services and to that of the firms from whom the demand for banking services is most likely to stem from. These findings have been stable throughout the period 1991-2015, despite the dramatic changes occurring in that time span (liberalization, ICT and the great recession). On the other hand, local areas with a higher (lower) presence of banking branches tend to be geographically clustered, displaying also a moderately decreasing pattern in this polarization. IC technologies partially contributed to this trend.