NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Bank Concentration and Crises

Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirguc-Kunt, Ross Levine

NBER Working Paper No. 9921*
Issued in August 2003
NBER Program(s):   IFM    ME    AP

An NBER digest for this paper is available.

Motivated by public policy debates about bank consolidation and conflicting theoretical predictions about the relationship between the market structure of the banking industry and bank fragility, this paper studies the impact of bank concentration, bank regulations, and national institutions on the likelihood of suffering a systemic banking crisis. Using data on 70 countries from 1980 to 1997, we find that crises are less likely in economies with (i) more concentrated banking systems, (ii) fewer regulatory restrictions on bank competition and activities, and (iii) national institutions that encourage competition.

*Published: Beck, Thorsten, Asli Demirguc-Kunt and Ross Levine. "Bank Concentration, Competition, And Crises: First Results," Journal of Banking and Finance, 2006, v30(5,May), 1581-1603.

You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.

Information about Free Papers

You should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, a journalist, a site with your domain name in ".GOV", or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy.

If you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work VPN or proxy (if any) or elect to have a link to the paper emailed to your work email address below. The email address must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution. Gmail and other free email addresses will not have access.

E-mail:

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

 
Publications
Activities
Meetings
Data
People
About

National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org