IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cdiwps/halshs-01015806.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Bank Competition and Credit Constraints in Developing Countries: New Evidence

Author

Listed:
  • Florian Leon

    (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UdA - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Bank Competition and Credit Constraints in Developing Countries: New Evidence Whether competition helps or hinders small firms' access to finance is in itself a much debated question in the economic literature and in policy circles, especially in the developing world. Economic theory offers conflicting predictions and empirical contributions provide mixed results. This paper considers the consequences of interbank competition on credit constraints using firm level data covering 70 developing and emerging countries. In addition to the classical concentration measures, competition is assessed by computing three non-structural measures (Lerner index, Boone indicator, and H-statistics). The results show that bank competition alleviates credit constraints, while bank concentration measures are not robust predictors of a firm's access to finance. Findings highlight that bank competition not only leads to less severe loan approval decisions but also reduces borrowers' discouragement. In addition, a secondary result of this paper documents that banking competition enhances credit availability more by reducing prices than by increasing relationship lending.

Suggested Citation

  • Florian Leon, 2014. "Bank Competition and Credit Constraints in Developing Countries: New Evidence," CERDI Working papers halshs-01015806, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:cdiwps:halshs-01015806
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01015806
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01015806/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Szabó, Zsolt, 2019. "Elbátortalanodott hiteligénylők a vállalati szektorban [Discouraged borrowers in the corporate sector]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(11), pages 1145-1186.
    2. Li, Shuangyan & Fu, Huan & Wen, Jun & Chang, Chun-Ping, 2020. "Separation of ownership and control for Chinese listed firms: Effect on the cost of debt and the moderating role of bank competition," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    3. Peisen Liu & Shoujun Huang & Houjian Li, 2018. "Bank Concentration and Firms' Debt Structure: Evidence from China," Annals of Economics and Finance, Society for AEF, vol. 19(1), pages 213-227, May.
    4. Bátiz-Zuk, Enrique & Lara-Sánchez, José Luis, 2022. "Measuring the evolution of competition and the impact of the financial reform in the Mexican banking sector, 2008–2019," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 59(C).
    5. Álvarez, Roberto & Bertin, Mauricio Jara, 2016. "Banking competition and firm-level financial constraints in Latin America," Emerging Markets Review, Elsevier, vol. 28(C), pages 89-104.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Bank competition; discouraged borrower; developing countries; access to credit;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L1 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
    • G20 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:cdiwps:halshs-01015806. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Contact - CERDI - Université Clermont Auvergne (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.