L’expérience de la « Grande Récession » a conduit économistes et praticiens à porter une attention particulière àla stabilité financière,mais aussi, dans la perspective de sortie de crise, aux moyens de financer l’émergence d’unnouveau modèle de croissance plus durable.Dans ce contexte, notre thèse se propose d’apprécier l’influence de laconcurrence bancaire sur la stabilité et sur l’efficience, afin d’éclairer le débat sur le degré de concurrence optimalen Europe. À cet effet, on étudie, tout d’abord, les effets de la concurrence bancaire sur l’instabilité financière, ense saisissant du concept de risque systémique. Cela nous conduit à mener à bien deux études distinctes : l’uneportant sur la répartition du risque systémique entre entités financières, l’autre sur la procyclicité financière.Dansles deux cas, nous concluons à l’existence d’un lien positif entre concurrence et stabilité. Nous nous intéressonsensuite à la question de la stabilité en termes d’efficacité de la politique de stabilisationmonétaire. Dans ce cadre,on met en évidence que la concurrence bancaire améliore l’efficacité de deux canaux de transmission : le canal destaux d’intérêt et le canal du crédit bancaire. L’insuffisance de l’intégration bancaire européenne, dont témoignel’hétérogénéité de la concurrence, s’avère ainsi un facteur explicatif de la fragmentation observée de la zone euro.Finalement, nous considérons la possibilité que la croissance économique puisse être fonction de la concurrencebancaire. À cet effet, on montre d’abord que cette dernière aurait théoriquement deux effets contradictoires sur lacroissance économique, avant finalement, de faire valoir empiriquement que la concurrence bancaire exerce, enEurope, des effets négatifs sur la croissance économique, en particulier en freinant la croissance de la productivitéglobale des facteurs. Nos travaux accréditent donc l’idée que stimuler la concurrence conduit à un arbitrage entrestabilité et efficience. / The experience of the “Great Recession” has led economists and policymakers to pay particular attention tofinancial stability. It also lead them to think how to get out of this recession, and particularly on the meansof financing the emergence of a new, more sustainable growth model. In this context, this thesis studies theinfluence of bank competition on stability and efficiency in order to shed light on the debate about the optimallevel of bank competition in Europe. For this purpose, we first study the effects of bank competition on financialinstability by focusing on the concept of systemic risk. This leads us to undertake two distinct studies: onefocusing on the distribution of systemic risk between financial institutions; the other on financial procyclicality.In both cases, we conclude that a positive link between competition and stability does exist.We then focus on thequestion of stability in terms of the effectiveness of the monetary stabilisation policy. In this respect, we show thatbank competition improves the efficiency of two channels of monetary transmission: the interest rate and thebank lending channels. Therefore, the lack of European banking integration, highlighted by the heterogeneity ofbank competition, is one factor that explains the fragmentation that can be observed in the Eurozone. Finally, weconsider the possibility that economic growth may be a function of bank competition. To do this, we first showhow competition could impact economic growth in theory, and find two opposing effects. We then demonstrateempirically that bank competition has negative effects on economic growth, in particular by decreasing totalfactor productivity growth. Our work hence supports the idea that stimulating competition leads to a trade-offbetween stability and efficiency.

This dissertation is composed of four essays that empirically investigate three topics in financial economics; financial stress and its leading indicators, the relationship between bank competition and financial stability, and the link between management board composition and bank risk. In the first essay we examine which variables have predictive power for financial stress in 25 OECD countries, using a recently constructed financial stress index. We find that panel models can hardly explain FSI dynamics. Although better results are achieved in country models, our findings suggest that financial stress is hard to predict out-of- sample despite the reasonably good in-sample performance of the models. The second essay develops an early warning framework for assessing systemic risks and predicting systemic events over two horizons of different length on a panel of 14 countries. We build a financial stress index to identify the starting dates of systemic financial crises and select crisis-leading indicators in a two-step approach; we find relevant prediction horizons for each indicator and employ Bayesian model averaging to identify the most useful predictors. We find superior performance of the long-horizon model for the Czech Republic. The theoretical literature gives conflicting predictions on how bank...