This paper analyses the impact of loan market competition on the interest rates applied by euro area banks to loans and … deposits during the 1994-2004 period, using a novel measure of competition called the Boone indicator. We find evidence that … stronger competition implies significantly lower spreads between bank and market interest rates for most loan market products …

This paper is the first that applies a new measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This … approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of … competition can consider the entire banking market only. A caveat of the Boone-indicator may be that it assumes that banks …