Bank Competition and its Determinants: Evidence from Indian Banking

Abstract

This paper measures the degree of bank competition in India using a sample of 70 commercial banks over the period 1996–2016. To assess the degree of competition, we estimate the market power of each bank in our sample employing three nonstructural measures: the Lerner index, the adjusted Lerner index, and the Boone indicator. Bank-wise and year-wise estimates of the marginal cost required in all these measures are obtained using the semi-parametric method. The paper further attempts to undertake a comprehensive assessment of competition in Indian banking and identifies various bank-specific, macroeconomic, structural, and contestability indicators, which are supposed to explain level and variation of the degree of competition over time. Empirical findings reveal that public-sector banks in India exercise a relatively higher degree of bank competition compared to private and foreign-sector banks. However, aggregate results support that the Indian banking system is competitive in general. Unlike the structure-conduct-performance paradigm, which advocates that a concentrated banking system impairs competitiveness, our findings reveal that concentration measures hardly exert any effect on bank competition. Rather, contestability measures play a significant role in the determination of bank competition.     

审慎监管有效性的实证研究——基于银行效率和风险的视角

基于2007～2013年我国商业银行面板数据,检验审慎监管指标与银行效率和风险的关系,从银行发展的视角对审慎监管有效性进行实证分析.研究发现;较高的资本充足率在降低银行信贷风险的同时,也导致其成本效率和利润效率下降;拨备覆盖率的增加有利于降低银行信贷风险,但却显著地提高了银行成本效率;存贷比监管不仅不能降低银行信贷风险和经营风险,还显著地增加了银行成本效率和利润效率,流动性比率对银行风险和银行效率的影响均不显著.这些结论表明,不同审慎监管工具对银行风险和效率的影响存在差别,部分审慎监管工具在降低银行风险的同时,也降低了银行效率,审慎监管的目标在效率和风险之间存在一定的取舍.     

国有商业银行改革过程中的经营效率评价

效率是衡量银行资源配置和经营成效的重要指标,效率分析可以从定量的角度评价我国国有商业银行在改革过程中的经营水平和改革成效.本文采用非参数分析的数据包络分析方法DEA,使用C2R模型对我国国有商业银行进行了两组DEA分析.分析结果显示,我国国有商业银行改革有一定的成效,但阶段性非常明显,突出表现在1994-1997年和2003-2004年.改革过程中的银行经营效率与政府的政策推动和扶持有相当紧密的关系.     

财政支配假说、铸币税与中央银行独立性

鉴于发展中国家发展比较落后,经济总量不强,政府的财政行为影响了社会生活的各个方面,它支配并决定了中央银行独立性的程度,铸币税问题相应也显得尤为突出.本文据此以财政支配假说为理论基础,结合铸币税问题,在介绍发展中国家中央银行独立性概况后就中国中央银行独立性问题做一分析.     

Does Regulation in Credit,Labour and Business Matter for Bank Performance in the EU-10 Economies?

Cost efficiency scores for banks in ten new EU member countries of Central and Eastern Europe are estimated using a parametric approach (data envelopment analysis) for the period prior to and immediately following their accession (2000–2010). These are then used in both fixed effects and dynamic panels to estimate the impact of regulation on bank specific efficiency in the transition economies of the EU. Using the Fraser Index of Economic Freedom (Gwartney, Hall, and Lawson 2012) we find that, among all the indices of economic freedom, the composite regulation index that includes regulation in credit, labour and business has more importance for the banking sector as results suggest a positive and statistically significant impact on bank efficiency. By decomposing the regulation index into its three components (credit, business and labour regulation) we find that strict labour regulation is associated with lower bank cost efficiency while certain aspects of credit regulation such as foreign ownership and competition as well as private ownership are significantly associated with improved efficiency. The dynamic panel vector autoregression (VAR) results using impulse response functions and variance decomposition further support the validity of these results. These findings are valuable for both academics and policy makers in their attempts to understand the drivers of bank efficiency.     

China’s WTO Accession and Long-Term Profitability of Chinese Firms

As emerging economies integrate their markets with the rest of the world, competition-driven changes in profitability are increasingly affected by shocks of various types from the business environment. We examine the dynamics of profitability distributions under such conditions using China’s WTO accession as a natural experiment to carry out before and after comparisons. Our results suggest that after WTO accession, the long-run (ergodic) distribution of conditional profitability rates of Chinese firms has become more dispersed. Due to the large proportion of firms at the poor performance end, this suggests that the financial stability of the Chinese economy will be endangered if the business environment were to deteriorate. There is an urgent need to reduce the widening span of the distribution of profitability at the lower end by accelerating the restructuring of Chinese companies.     

美国监狱私有化原因研究

私有化是将政府整体或部分职责转移到私人部门的过程,监狱私有化意味着私人部门参与提供传统上由政府提供的管教服务.探究美国监狱私有化的原因,有助于估计私人监狱运动的发展前景.美国监狱私有化现象的主要动因在于快速增长的囚犯、监狱过度拥挤和成本问题.尽管监狱私有化不一定向声称的那样能够大幅度降低成本和提高效率,但是真正重要的是认识到私有化节约成本和提高效率本身是竞争过程的结果.最为重要的事情是决定如何最好地提供有关服务,而不是简单地选择要么由公共部门,要么由私人部门负责监狱体系的运转.通过引入竞争力量与机制,监狱私有化也许仍然有发展的空间.     

Foreign Direct Investment and mark-up dynamics: Evidence from Spanish firms

A review of the literature indicates that Foreign Direct Investment has the potential to increase the intensity of competition and to act as a channel for technology transfers. Using a Spanish firm level data set, we disentangle these effects by estimating a dynamic model of firm level performance, which we proxy by mark-ups. We find that FDI has a positive long-run effect on the mark-ups of targets, but this is limited to firms in R&D intensive sectors. In addition, we find weak evidence that foreign presence dampens margins. However, this effect appears to be more than compensated by positive spillovers in the case of knowledge intensive industries.     

Does the US EXIM Bank really promote US exports?

This paper investigates the impact of US Export‐Import Bank (EXIM ) on US exports particularly in the wake of international competition from foreign national export credit agencies (ECA s). We employ a gravity framework on a country‐industry‐year‐level panel data set that matches EXIM authorisations with US bilateral exports. Our results depict the general ineffectiveness of the Bank in promoting exports within and across industries. Some heterogeneities behind the general finding are also uncovered: industries other than aerospace parts and products are more likely to benefit from EXIM authorisations, and EXIM authorisations to larger businesses seem to be more effective in encouraging exports. Furthermore, we find no evidence that EXIM encourages US exports by offsetting foreign ECA competition. These results are neither affected by competing countries’ membership to the OECD Arrangement nor by the size of American firms that received EXIM support. Our results cast doubt on the ubiquitously positive claims made by the Bank and its supporters, yet also provide policy lessons for countries that are either in the inception stages of establishing their own ECA s or are now placing greater importance on ECA financing in encouraging exports.     

区域经济增长趋同性分析——以安徽为例

本文在经济收敛理论的基础上,对安徽省1991-2011年区域经济的收敛性进行β收敛性分析。结果显示,该阶段不存在β绝对收敛,但是引入工业化、市场化和地区虚拟变量后,该省呈现β条件收敛。另外,该地区在被分为三大区域后,除了皖中以外,皖南和皖北均呈现不同程度的俱乐部收敛。最后得出结论并提出缩小省域经济差距的对策。     

中国对外贸易发展地区差异的收敛性分析

本文利用收敛σ、β收敛和俱乐部收敛理论检验了中国对外贸易发展地区差异的收敛性.总体而言,1978-2005年中国对外贸易发展存在β收敛但不存在σ收敛,并出现了一定程度的俱乐部收敛特征.究其原因,主要是地区经济发展不平衡、经济贸易体制改革的逐步推进以及各地区发展基础的不同.最后,本文对中国各地区对外贸易的协调发展提出了政策建议.     

Measuring competition in Portuguese commercial banking during the Golden Age (1960–1973)

The institutional environment of Portuguese banking during the Golden Age of economic growth (1950–1973) has been criticised in many accounts. According to various authors, on the one hand it would have granted excessive protection to existing banks, allowing them to obtain high rents, a disincentive for them to compete; on the other, it would have forced them to concentrate their activity excessively on short-term credit instruments, thereby preventing them from contributing effectively to finance growth. In this article we use a formal statistical approach of the Panzar–Rosse type and conclude that the system did, in fact, have some interesting competitive features.     

From merchant to merchant-ruler: A structure–conduct–performance perspective of the East India Company's history, 1600–1765

Many nineteenth-century historians claimed that the English East India Company's trade and commercial activities, right from inception, were never really a financially profitable enterprise. This argument is incorporated within an altered structure–conduct–performance (SCP) paradigm to rearticulate the Company's history between 1600 and 1765. Rather than characterising the Company as simply a chartered monopoly, the article instead argues that the market structure in which it operated was competitive or contestable but, at the same time, wrought with high sunk costs and free-riders. This framework allows us to understand why the Company desperately pursued market conduct strategies to gain monopoly and monopsony power in England and India respectively, which simultaneously contributed to its transformation from merchant to merchant-ruler. In this process the Company redefined not merely industry boundaries but also those between industry and state.     

Size,Growth, and Variance among the World's Largest Non-merged Banks

This paper analyses growth, size, and variance of the capital, assets, and pre-tax profits of large international banks during 1987-97.We test hypotheses on whether size matters. It turns out that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of bank capital, assets, and profits and the growth rate of these items.This is in line with the findings for US banks in the pre-BrettonWoods era. Furthermore, we did not find, in contrast with Tschoegl's observations for international banks in the 1970s, a negative relationship between the size of large banks and the variability of growth in capital, assets, or profits. We conclude that size is not a self-sustaining attribute of international banks.     

论超强有效市场

考虑到信息不对称、信息尤其是前瞻性信息的获得需要花费较高成本等因素,本文认为即使市场实现了强式有效,也不意味着经济效率就必然会实现.鉴于此,文中放松了有效市场理论的假设,考虑了前瞻性信息生产的不确定性,提出了超强有效市场的概念,并构造了一个超强有效均衡的模型.本文指出只有存在充分有效的激励和约束机制,使得投资者和经理都能努力生产关于公司潜在投资项目的前瞻性信息,并且经理会对股价传递的信息做出积极的反应时,股票市场才会真正在实现信息效率的同时充分发挥优化资源配置的功能.     

开放体系下我国外资银行监管问题探析

本文从外资银行在我国的经营现状入手,分析现阶段我国银行监管机构在外资银行监管制度、监管力量和监管方式等方面存在的问题和不足。在外资银行充分开放情况下,着力培养一支适应新形势的金融监管队伍,对外资银行实施风险监管,加强银行监管的现代化、知识化建设是必然选择。     

(Im)Balanced customer-oriented behaviors and AI chatbots' Efficiency–Flexibility performance: The moderating role of customers’ rational choices

Artificial intelligence (AI) based chatbots are increasingly deployed in frontline encounters, because they combine frontline service efficiency and flexibility. Using a large-scale data set with more than 130,000 man–machine dialogues from an e-bike sharing platform, Study 1 reveals a complex relationship between chatbots' customer-oriented behaviors and their efficiency–flexibility ambidexterity. Chatbots' level of efficiency–flexibility ambidexterity is higher when their functional and relational customer-oriented behaviors are balanced rather than imbalanced (i.e., a negative imbalance effect) and when they are balanced at a higher rather than a lower level (i.e., a positive balance effect). A follow-up experiment, Study 2, and online survey, Study 3, consistently show that the negative imbalance effect is stronger as customers' perceptions of non-personalization costs decrease and privacy concerns increase, while opportunity cost has no significant influence on the negative imbalance effect. However, consistent with rational choice theory, the positive balance effect is stronger as non-personalization costs increase, privacy concerns decrease, and opportunity cost decreases. In addition, Study 1 and 3 consistently show that in alignment with the stimulus–organism–response framework, efficiency–flexibility ambidexterity partially mediates the relationship between chatbots’ (im)balanced customer-oriented behaviors and customer patronage. This study contributes to the literature on frontline ambidexterity by introducing an AI application context and a more nuanced nonlinear view of the antecedents and consequences of frontline ambidexterity.     

全球性竞争政策及其对我国的启示

竞争政策旨在保护和促进竞争,目前在这一领域的国际协调成效并不显著.随着经济全球化的深入发展,在世界范围内建立统一的竞争政策的要求日益迫切,在此背景下西方学者提出创建全球性竞争政策的观点,主张将竞争政策纳入多边贸易体制.竞争政策的国际化需要贸易政策等其他经济政策作出相应协调与配合.我国对全球性竞争政策的建立应采取积极态度,并以此为契机完善国内竞争体系,调整其他相关经济政策,在竞争中求发展.     

国际贸易与环境——相关假说的评述

国际贸易对环境的影响问题在自由贸易论者与环境保护论者之间,引发了激烈的争论。自由贸易论者认为自由贸易将使环境质量得以改善,而环境保护论者则认为贸易自由化会导致环境质量的退化。在双方的争论过程中,形成了国际贸易对环境影响的几个假说。本文对这几个假说进行了简要评述,并指出了其合理性及存在的缺陷。