Competitive bank pricing and adverse selection,with implications for testing the SCP hypothesis

Adverse borrower selection implies that competitive interest rates on bank loans will be an increasing function of the number of banks in the market, whenever the marginal cost of lending does not rise too sharply with market concentration (a condition supported by a variety of empirical evidence). Moreover, this linkage is stronger during economic recessions when more loans default. These findings suggest a need to reinterpret many prior empirical studies of loan price versus concentration, as well as raising new considerations in the appropriate construction of future empirical tests.