Measuring the Level of Competition in the Argentine Banking Industry

Loan rates in Argentina are high. The objective of this work is to test if market power is one of the causes of these levels of interest rates and to measure its effects. For that purpose we work with data of the period 1994-1999. The tests indicate that there is market power in the peso operation sector and perfect competition can not be rejected in the dollar operation sector. We also find that there was no significant change in our measure of market power during the years we have analyzed.