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Bank Market Concentration and Interest Spreads: South Asian Evidence

This paper investigates whether any deviations in South Asian banks' interest margins can be attributed to market concentration after controlling for other bank-specific factors and exogenous environmental influences. To that end, an improved structural price-concentration model was estimated (using a sample of both state-owned and private-owned banks and a truncated sample of private-owned banks) with multiple definitions of market share covering loan and deposit markets. The findings suggest that no significant deviations in bank interest margins can be attributed to market concentration. Instead, only dominant South Asian banks with larger market shares were found to extract higher interest margins.