Market Power and Cost Efficiency in the African Banking Industry

Simplice Asongu, Rexon Nting and Joseph Nnanna ()
Additional contact information
Joseph Nnanna: The Development Bank of Nigeria, Abuja, Nigeria

No 19/080, Working Papers of the African Governance and Development Institute. from African Governance and Development Institute.

Abstract: Purpose- In this study, we test the so-called ‘Quiet Life Hypothesis’ (QLH) which postulates that banks with market power are less efficient. Design/methodology/approach- We employ instrumental variable Ordinary Least Squares, Fixed Effects, Tobit and Logistic regressions. The empirical evidence is based on a panel of 162 banks consisting of 42 African countries for the period 2001-2011. There is a two-step analytical procedure. First, we estimate Lerner indices and cost efficiency scores. Then, we regress cost efficiency scores on Lerner indices contingent on bank characteristics, market features and the unobserved heterogeneity. Findings- The empirical evidence does not support the QLH because market power is positively associated with cost efficiency. Originality/value- Owing to data availability constraints, this is one of the few studies to test the QLH in African banking.

Keywords: Finance; Savings banks; Competition; Efficiency; Quiet life hypothesis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E42 E52 E58 G21 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15
Date: 2019-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-com, nep-eff and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Forthcoming: Journal of Economic Studies

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.afridev.org/RePEc/agd/agd-wpaper/Market ... Banking-Industry.pdf Revised version, 2019 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Market power and cost efficiency in the African banking industry (2020)
Working Paper: Market Power and Cost Efficiency in the African Banking Industry (2019)
Working Paper: Market Power and Cost Efficiency in the African Banking Industry (2019)
Working Paper: Market Power and Cost Efficiency in the African Banking Industry (2019)
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:agd:wpaper:19/080

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of the African Governance and Development Institute. from African Governance and Development Institute. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Asongu Simplice ().