What is the impact of credit crunch on the competition of EU banking?

The credit crunch initiated in US in 2008 has been gradually found its way to severely impact upon the EU banking industry. There are many implications of this crunch, and to this day there has not been a comprehensive analysis of identifying all of them. This paper does not offer any silver bullet towards identifying all possible implications of the global financial crisis. Rather, we focus our analysis on an area that has not been dealt in the literature. Moreover, we raise the issue of the impact of the credit crunch on the competition of the EU banking. The empirical methodology follows the Panzar - Rosse analysis for the EU banking, which is assumed to be both a competitive and integrated market. After we identify the dominant form of the market, which is monopolistic competition; we proceed further by examining whether this market form has been altered over recent years. Our results show that indeed there has been a structural break in the underlying market structure towards the direction of even less competition.  Sensitivity analysis is also performed so as to identify competition by opting for a weighted procedure in order to control for firm size, ownership, and the number of branches.