This paper studies the impact of competition on the determination of interest rates, and on banks’ risk taking behaviour, under different assumptions about deposit insurance and the dissemination of financial information. We find that lower entry costs foster competition in deposit rates and...

A large theoretical literature shows that competition reduces banks' franchise values and induces them to take more risk. Recent research contradicts this result: When banks charge lower rates, their borrowers have an incentive to choose safer investments, so they will in turn be safer. However,...

We investigate how bank competition affects the efficiency of credit allocation, using a model of spatial competition. Our analysis shows that bad loans are more likely the larger the number of banks competing for customers. We study further how many banks will be active if market entry is not...

Banks play a central role in financing and monitoring firms in transition economies. This study examines how bank competition affects the efficiency of credit allocation; monitoring of firms; and the firms' restructuring effort. In our model, banks compete to finance an investment project with...

We develop a parsimonious model of innovating firms rich enough to confront firm-level evidence. It captures the dynamic behaviour of individual heterogeneous firms, describes the evolution of an industry with simultaneous entry and exit, and delivers a general equilibrium model of technological...

We investigate the causal effect of market structure on market performance in the consumer electronics. We combine data from Austria's largest online site for price comparisons with retail data on wholesale prices provided by a major hardware producer for consumer electronics. We observe input...

This Paper empirically tests the ‘bounds approach’ to industry structure proposed by Sutton ((1991), (1998)). To carry out this task, we focus on the chemical industry. Part of the novelty in this exercise is that we work on the finest possible level of disaggregation. Also, we identify...

This Paper examines the effect of price competition on innovation, market structure and profitability in R&D-intensive industries. The theoretical predictions are tested using UK data on the evolution of competition, concentration, innovation counts and profitability over 1952-77. The...

We propose a heteroscedastic regression model to identify the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted to small and medium sized enterprises. We interpret unexplained deviations as evidence of the banks’ discretionary use of market power in the loan rate setting...

Recent theoretical models argue that a bank’s organizational structure reflects its lending technology. A hierarchically organized bank will employ mainly hard information, whereas a decentralized bank will rely more on soft information. We investigate theoretically and empirically how bank...