Bank competition and firm credit availability: firm-bank evidence from Europe

Pietro Grandi () and Caroline Bozou
Additional contact information
Pietro Grandi: UP2 - Université Panthéon-Assas, LEMMA - Laboratoire d'économie mathématique et de microéconomie appliquée - UP2 - Université Panthéon-Assas

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of bank competition on firms' access to credit using a large panel of 900 banks matched to almost 60.000 firms across the euro area over the period 2010-2016. Results provide empirical support for the market power hypothesis whereby low interbank competition worsens firms' credit conditions. We find that higher bank market power is associated with lower short-term bank credit and higher trade credit for customer firms. Furthermore, high bank market power is especially detrimental for small, low quality and opaque firms, suggesting that lower inter-bank competition exacerbates the financial constraint of borrowers that are more exposed to information problems. By contrast, we find limited evidence consistent with the information hypothesis: among firms related to banks with high market power, only those served by small and local cooperatives obtain more bank credit. This finding highlights the relative importance of specialisation, ownership structure and local outreach in favouring credit relationships between borrowers and lenders.

Keywords: Banks; inter-bank competition; access to nance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-10-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-com
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01897744v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-01897744v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-01897744

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().