Purpose - Banks are institutions that inject money in the economy and help to boost it when there are problems in some markets, especially in productive sectors. In this way, analysing the competition in this sector is an important tool for policymakers as non-competitive behaviour could affect...

The quiet life hypothesis posits that firms with market power incur inefficiencies rather than reap monopolistic rents. We propose a simple adjustment to Lerner indices to account for the possibility of forgone rents to test this hypothesis. For a large sample of U.S. commercial banks, we find...

This study assesses competitive conditions in the Chinese commercial banking industry during a period of major structural change. In particular, the Rosse-Panzar H-statistic is estimated for a panel of 76 banks over the period 1997-2006. The results show that banks in China operate under a...

The quiet life hypothesis posits that firms with market power incur inefficiencies rather than reap monopolistic rents. We propose a simple adjustment to Lerner indices to account for the possibility of foregone rents to test this hypothesis. For a large sample of U.S. commercial banks, we find...

This paper analyzes the evolution of competitive conditions of Hong Kong's banking industry based the Panzar-Rosse approach and a panel dataset of retail banks in Hong Kong for the period 1991-2005. Relaxation of bank regulations and bank consolidations have changed substantially the banking...

Purpose - Banks are institutions that inject money in the economy and help to boost it when there are problems in some markets, especially in productive sectors. In this way, analysing the competition in this sector is an important tool for policymakers as non-competitive behaviour could affect...