LONDON

The results of recent stress tests of Europe’s biggest banks should have reassured investors that the sector can withstand another crisis. A slump in share prices across the industry since the findings’ publication on Friday suggests many have yet to be convinced.

On Tuesday, bank stocks across Europe — even those that were effectively given a clean bill of health by the European Banking Authority’s tests — fell sharply for the second day running and weighed heavily on the wider market indexes.

The falls aren’t just confined to Italy, where concerns over the health of the banking sector have been the most acute. Britain’s Barclays PLC was down 2.9 percent, while Germany’s Commerzbank slid 6.6 percent and Italy’s UniCredit fell another 6.9 percent.

As a result, the main indexes in Europe were sharply lower — both Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC-40 were down 1.4 percent in mid-afternoon trading.

It’s difficult to pin down a single reason why European banking stocks have taken such a battering this week. After all, Friday’s stress tests into Europe’s 51 biggest banks showed that only Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena, or MPS, was severely underfunded.

Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets in London, says the tests’ findings failed to address many of the concerns investors have about the state of Europe’s banks, including the rising costs they face for parking their cash at the European Central Bank.

The ECB has in recent months been reducing its so-called deposit rate further below zero in the hope that banks opt to lend money rather than place it at the ECB. That rate is now minus 0.4 percent and many economists think it could be cut further in coming months as the ECB tries to encourage lending.

“Skepticism that the EBA bank stress tests painted a far too rosy picture of the health of Europe’s banks while paying no account of the current negative rate environment nor for that matter the fiscal health of Portuguese and Greek banks,” Hewson said.

No banks from Portugal or Greece were assessed in the stress tests. And they are two countries still struggling with high debts and low growth, a backdrop that makes their banks susceptible to a new financial or economic crisis. Throughout Europe’s debt crisis, it was clear that problems in one country can easily spill over to another.

One country that saw a number of its banks assessed Friday was Italy.

Italian banks have been worn down by some $400 billion in loans that won’t be paid back in full as a result of years of crisis and subdued growth that’s made it difficult for firms and households to service their debts. The scale of the non-performing loans stands a little below 20 percent of the banks’ total loan stock, a level that weighs on their propensity and ability to lend.