Investigating the development of bank competition during the three most recent decades of European integration through comparing and contrasting competition indicators
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School of Business |
Bachelor's thesis
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Authors
Date
2020
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Taloustiede
Language
en
Pages
30
Series
Abstract
This paper examines the development of bank competition during the most recent decades of European integration. The period under investigation is from the early 1990s to the present because the 1990s marked the beginning of deeper integration. This was driven by factors such as the establishment of the Economic and Monetary Union and the European Union. The analysis is conducted in the form of a literature review. The different methods of measuring bank competition play an important role in the paper, and the analysis is organized according to these different indicators. A distinction is made between structural and non-structural indicators. The former type measures market structure and the latter focuses on bank conduct and profitability. The most widely used indicators include but are not limited to Lerner index, H-statistic, and Hirschman-Herfindahl index. Considerable differences are found to exist between results from different indicators. It is concluded that indicators tend to focus on different aspects of bank activities. Therefore, the indica-tor should be carefully chosen according to the interests of the study in question, and the results should not be used to infer competition levels in activities that the indicator is not suited to measure. Although there are some inconsistencies between studies, the findings show that the bank com-petition level does not seem to have increased significantly during the investigation period. After a relatively stable level during the first decade of the period many researchers have reported increased competition before the 2008 financial crisis. In post-crisis years bank competition seems to have weakened for a few years, which has been followed by moderate increases in the 2010s. The levels in different countries have been seen to converge to one another; yet, differences still persist. An important point that emerges from the analysis is that there seem to be considerable differences in competition levels between different types of banks. Banks that operate in larger geo-graphical markets and rely less on traditional activities face stronger competition than do local banks that focus on traditional loan-and-deposit activities.Description
Thesis advisor
Mustonen, MikkoMurto, Pauli
Keywords
European integration, European Union, bank competition, bank specialization, Lerner index, Hirschman-Herfindahl index, H-statistic, EU