This paper analyses the effects of concentration on profitability in the US banking sector from 1994-2005, using bank-level panel data. A new index of concentration is proposed, which reflects the depth and intensity of concentration. The econometric specification facilitates the simultaneous...

The question of whether more competition among banks increases relationship banking, which is predicted to improve credit availability for informationally opaque firms in theory, is a controversial issue in the banking literature. By using firm-level survey data in Japan, this paper provides...

We discuss evidence that the microcredit industry in Bangladesh has seen emergence of large variations in the size of the microfinance institutions operating in the market-- on the one hand, there are large national-level MFIs, while on the other hand, small localized MFIs operating only within...

The aim of this study is to provide a methodology for the joint estimation of efficiency and market power of individual banks. The proposed method utilizes the separate implications of the new empirical industrial organization and the stochastic frontier literatures and suggests identification...

Many studies have analysed the effect of financial development and bank competition on economic growth from a cross-country perspective. However, to our knowledge, no paper has analysed the effect of these two financial variables on growth at regional level. This paper examines the case of the...

This study analyses the interest margin in the principal European banking sectors (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain) in the period 1993-2000 using a panel of 15,888 observations, identifying the fundamental elements affecting this margin. Our starting point is the methodology...

This paper analyzes the effect of regional financial development and bank competition on firms’ growth using the Spanish provinces as a testing ground. Our results show that firms in industries with a greater dependence on external finance grow faster in more financially developed provinces....

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of financial development and banking competition on economic growth using both structural measures of competition (market concentration) and measures based on the new empirical industrial organization perspective (Panzar and Rosse`s test and the...

This paper investigates the relationship between the changing patterns of bank’s source of income and risk adjusted performance. A database of 77 banks over the period of 1999 to 2004 is constructed for the 27 public sector banks, 22 private banks, 25 foreign banks and 3 cooperative banks to...

In this study, we use data from the Federal Reserve’s 1993, 1998 and 2003 Surveys of Small Business Finances to classify small businesses into four groups based upon their credit needs and to model the credit allocation process into a sequence of three steps. First, do firms need credit? We...