دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی ساختار بازار، اجرای بانک و عملکرد بانکی: شواهد از ASEAN - الزویر 2018

Abstract

Whether banks in a concentrated market increase their profits through monopoly pricing is a question of prime concern for antitrust policies. We explore this question by introducing the role of bank conduct into the structure-performance relationship. We apply Two-step System GMM dynamic panel model to commercial banks in ASEAN countries over the period of 1999-2014. The results indicate that the higher profits in concentrated banking industries are partially attributable to the anti-competitive conduct by the banks. These findings are robust across alternative measures of market structure and bank conduct, and different time horizons. The implications of these findings require regulators to make sure that the consolidation policy for ASEAN is achieving its purpose – i.e. achieving financial stability – and not allowing the banks to earn monopoly rents.

5. Conclusion

The policy implications of the SCP hypothesis require that the consolidations activities should be monitored because concentration eliminates competition from the market and leads to market inefficiency i.e. monopoly profits. The implications of the SCP are important for banking industry in ASEAN for ongoing shift towards a more concentrated market structure. Moreover, there has also been an increase in banks’ profitability and a decrease in cost efficiency. These facts are alarming for antitrust policies if the banks in ASEAN are profitable through monopoly pricing. However, the traditional test of the SCP hypothesis may not be useful for analyzing the situation, owing to the identification issues.

In this study, we apply a different approach to test the SCP hypothesis that overcomes the issues with traditional methodology. Instead of relating market structure directly to the performance, we introduce the bank conduct as an intermediating variable between market structure and performance. We follow the procedure introduced by Baron and Kenny (1986) to examine the mediating effect of bank conduct. Accordingly, four conditions have been specified for the existence of a mediation effect: i) bank concentration influences the conduct of the banks, ii) the bank conduct affects the performance of the banks, iii) bank concentration affects the bank performance in absence of the bank conduct, and (iv) the impact of the bank concentration on the bank performance reduces with the inclusion of bank conduct in the estimation model. Additionally, the study employs an alternative procedure laid down in Goodman (1960), Sobel (1982), and MacKinnon et al. (1995) to test the indirect relationship between market structure and bank performance through bank conduct.