Out of many, dominance by a few? Market power in the Jamaican banking sector.

This paper presents an empirical assessment of the degree of competition within the Jamaican banking sector during the period 1998 to 2007. The popular H-statistic by Panzar and Rosse is utilised to estimate market power among the sample of banks. Using usual statistical tests, we are unable to reject monopoly/perfect collusion for the banking market in Jamaica. This contrasts with earlier findings using alternative estimators. Therefore, the use of a dynamic reformulation of the model with a dynamic estimator highlights some collusive behaviour among banks.