欧洲银行联盟的障碍

Barriers to a EuropeanBanking Union Damien Capelle, Andriano Fernandes, J.J. Kruger, and PeterMcAdam WP/26/123 IMF Working Papersdescribe research inprogress by the author(s) and are published toelicit comments and to encourage debate.The views expressed in IMF Working Papers arethose of the author(s) and do not necessarilyrepresent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board,or IMF management. 2026JUN IMF Working PaperResearch Department Barriers to a European Banking UnionPrepared by Damien Capelle, Andriano Fernandes, J.J. Kruger, and Peter McAdam* Authorized for distribution by Maria Soledad Martinez PeriaJune 2026 IMF Working Papersdescribe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicitcomments and to encourage debate.The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of theauthor(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management. ABSTRACT:We quantify barriers to cross-border banking within the euro area and their consequences for creditallocation and output. Using loan-level data from the European credit registry (AnaCredit) and group structures(RIAD), we estimate barriers to relationship formation, loan pricing, and banks’ branching decisions at thecountry-pair level. We find that barriers to cross-border relationships between banks and firms and cross-borderbank entry are large while wedges on interest rates and loan quantities are comparatively small. The estimatedwedges are strongly associated with differences in national banking regulations, measured using a novel dataseton regulatory distances. We embed our estimates into a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model withheterogeneous banks and firms subject to cross-border frictions in relationship formation, loan pricing, and bankentry. Partially relaxing frictions predicts sizable and heterogeneous output gains across euro area countries.These gains are primarily driven by increases in capital and labor rather than improvements in allocativeefficiency. Barriers to a European BankingUnion Prepared by Damien Capelle, Andriano Fernandes, J.J. Kruger, and PeterMcAdam 1Introduction Despite major institutional reforms since the European sovereign debt crisis, theEuropean Banking Union remains incomplete and banking markets remain frag-mented along national lines. While capital mobility is legally guaranteed withinthe European Union, de facto financial integration remains limited, with persis-tent home bias in lending, funding, and bank operations. Regulatory heterogene-ity, national resolution frameworks, deposit insurance fragmentation, and super-visory differences are widely viewed as key obstacles to cross-border banking (En-ria, 2021). The recent Draghi (2024) Report on European competitiveness empha-sizes that incomplete financial integration constrains Europe’s growth potential bypreventing savings from flowing to their most productive uses across borders. This paper measures the barriers to cross-border bank lending to firms withinEurope and quantifies their implications for credit allocation and aggregate out-put. We develop a structural model of cross-border banking with heterogeneousfirms and banks in which banks choose where to operate, set lending rates, andsupply credit, while firms choose which banks to borrow from.The model fea-tures three distinct sources of cross-border frictions: barriers to relationship for-mation between firms and banks, distortions in loan pricing, and impediments tobank entry across countries. We estimate these frictions using granular adminis-trative data from the European credit registry (AnaCredit) combined with bank-group information from RIAD, the ECB’s register of businesses and their affilia-tions. We then show that the estimated frictions are strongly correlated with mea-sures of regulatory fragmentation constructed from a novel dataset on nationalbanking policies. Finally, we calibrate the model using these micro data, quantifythe macroeconomic costs of these barriers and simulate counterfactual gains fromfurther integration. We first present stylized facts that motivate our analysis and the model’s struc-ture.Cross-border lending to firms within the euro area is remarkably limited:since 2019, it has accounted for less than 6% of total lending to non-financial cor-porations, despite the principle of free capital mobility enshrined in the Maas-tricht Treaty. Cross-border bank entry is similarly sparse, with few banking groupsoperating in foreign markets. Meanwhile, the regulatory landscape remains frag-mented across jurisdictions despite a decade of Banking Union reforms, with mea- surable differences across countries in prudential rules, resolution regimes, de-posit insurance schemes, and other policy domains. Taken together, they suggestthat European banking markets remain fragmented both de facto and de jure. We estimate barriers to cross-border activities directly from micro data withan econometric framework – an a