Market structure and risk taking in the banking industry

Oz Shy and Rune Stenbacka

No 22/1998, Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland

Abstract: This study demonstrates that the common view, whereby an increase in competition leads banks to increased risk taking, fails to hold in an environment where consumers can choose in which bank to make a deposit based on their knowledge of the riskiness incorporated in the banks' outstanding loan portfolios.We show that, in the absence of deposit insurance, competition between differentiated banks will increase the returns from diversification.We offer a welfare analysis establishing that introduction of competition into the banking industry can only improve social welfare.However, competition cannot always guarantee that diversification will occur to a socially optimal extent.Finally, we show that deposit insurance would eliminate the beneficial effects of banks competing with asset quality as a strategic instrument.

Keywords: Risk taking in banking; banks' portfolio diversification; bank competition; deposit insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/211822/1/bof-rdp1998-022.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Market Structure and Risk Taking in the Banking Industry (2004)
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:zbw:bofrdp:rdp1998_022

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().