Since the 1980s, important and progressive reforms have profoundly reshaped the structure of the Chinese banking system. Many empirical studies suggest that financial reform promoted bank competition in most mature and emerging economies. However, some earlier studies that adopted conventional...

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...

The aim of this paper is to assess the level of competition prevailing in the Spanish banking system. The current analysis employs a widely used non-structural methodology put forward by Panzar and Rosse (1987) —the so-called H-statistic— and draws upon a comprehensive panel dataset of...

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...

This paper investigates the relationship between credit market competition and the availability of bank credit for firms of unobserved credit quality when firms pledge collateral to secure the loans. Loan data from the Spanish Credit Register shows that the average credit quality of borrowers...

This paper explores the role of a number of factors in explaining the heterogeneity in the degree of price stickiness across industries, on the basis of the information provided by surveys on pricing behavior conducted in nine euro area countries. The main focus is placed on the influence of...

This paper offers empirical evidence for the Spanish case on the hypothesis that public ownership may be a determinant of a firm's performance. Two alternative definitions of efficiency are proposed: relative productivity and profitability. The role of ownership is tested, conditioning for the...