The European Banking Authority (EBA) and the European Central Bank (ECB) strive to deepen the harmonization of the EU banking regulation across the single market and within the single supervisory mechanism. This includes harmonization of 160 national options and discretions (O&Ds) that were embedded in the existing banking legislation in order to accommodate various national specifics. This paper codes the ECB’s decisions on individual O&Ds and compares them with choices made by national authorities, which were coded on the basis of their reports submitted to EBA. The data provide an empirical test of the thesis that due to its central role in the Eurozone and Euro crisis, Germany was able to impose its policy preferences on all other member states. The analysis also pinpoints which aspects of ECB’s O&D choices resemble the preferences of the most powerful member states most closely, thus providing some evidence of deepening tensions between the core and periphery of the Eurozone.
