Market Structure and Bank Fragility: Application to the Tunisian Banking System

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of market structure on bank fragility. We take the case of the Tunisian banking system during the period 1990-2012 and we use panel data for 10 Tunisian banks. The main conclusions show that the Tunisian banking sector fragility and risk taking by banks are explained by market structure. This structure is determined in another work where we found that banks in Tunisia operate in monopolistic competition. Indeed, the Tunisian banking system suffers from fragility that refl ects mainly the large share of nonperforming loans and whose principal cause the banking market structure. JEL Classification: D40, G21, L11