“…The literature on the effects of bank branch deregulation, apart from analyzing its effects on economic growth, has also studied its effects on other aspects such as: (i) income distribution (Beck et al, 2010); (ii) bank efficiency and productivity (Berger and DeYoung, 2001;DeYoung et al, 1998;Tirtiroglu et al, 2005;Jayaratne and Strahan, 1999;Guillén, 2009;Illueca et al, 2009); (iii) entrepreneurship (Wall, 2004); (iv) market power (Calem and Nakamura, 1988); (v) stability (Carlson and Mitchener, 2005;Ramírez, 2003;Shiers, 2002); or (vi) wealth effects (Carow and Heron, 1998;Fraser et al, 1997). In this case there are some contributions which have focused on non-US contexts such as the paper by Illueca et al (2009), who analyzed the effects of geographic expansion on the productivity of the Spanish saving banks, finding that those which expanded geographically outside their natural markets obtained greater productivity gains.…”