Banking competition and financial fragility: Evidence from panel-data

We study how banking competition may affect the stability of banking systems. We develop our study by expanding the failure-determinant methodology to include panel-data techniques and by controlling the effects of financial structure and development. We use indicators for 47 countries between 1990 and 1997. The main findings show that banking concentration and foreign ownership are associated to bank-based financial systems and financial underdevelopment. They also show that banking credit and bank-based financial systems enhance banking fragility. Banking concentration is not a significant determinant. Furthermore our findings suggest that financial structure and, maybe, the property regime matter to assess fragility.