رقابت در بازار با شرکت های مسلط: نگاهی به صنعت بانکداری ایتالیا

In this paper we consider the Italian banking industry, where the eight largest firms operate at a national level, manage about a half of total loans, and have a notably larger dimension than the other competitors. We estimate a structural model containing a behavioural parameter, in order to assess the market conduct of the largest banks for the period 1988–2000. Our finding is that, in spite of their noteworthy size and significant market share, these banks have been characterised by a more competitive conduct than the Bertrand–Nash outcome: this is in line with the results of the latest literature of the field, for which in the banking industry there is often no conflict between competition and concentration.

In the past two decades, European banking markets have been subjected to structural changes, due to modifications occurred in the external environment: particularly, the liberalisation of capital flows and the prospect of a common market have influenced the policy of the domestic banks. This has pushed them to search for more efficient organisational solutions, greater variety of the offered services and stronger exploitation of scale economies. The last of these phenomena has taken place especially thanks to an increasing consolidation, and has led to a fall in the number of banks. It is crucial to assess whether such modifications have had an impact on the degree of competition characterising the banking industry, because of the potential for monopoly power that the consolidation process could produce. This paper aims to evaluate the degree of competition of the eight Italian largest banks (the only operating throughout the whole country, and also involved in many mergers and acquisitions) during the period 1988–2000, and thus shed light on the possibility that few important banks use their dimension and market leadership to act as colluding oligopolists. Section 2 gives a brief picture of the structural evolution of the Italian banking industry over the recent years, and presents our conjectural variation model. Section 3 describes the sample characteristics and discusses the estimation results. Some conclusions are given in Section 4.

This paper has relied on a non-linear simultaneous-equation model for the period 1988–2000 (formed by a demand equation, a cost equation and a price–cost margin equation) in order to identify the degree of competitiveness characterising the eight Italian largest banks, the only ones which operate nationwide and have a noteworthy size and a significant market share. The results strongly reject the hypothesis of collusion or coordination among them, and are consistent with a more competitive conduct than the Nash outcome. Given the special features of the banking industry (asymmetric information, personal relationships between banks and customers, reputation), it seems that the degree of competition is considerable. Our findings are in line with the results of the recent literature in this field as well as with those of other studies on Italian data, and contradict the conclusions of the SCP approach, for which the tendency to concentration in a market is to be considered with concern for its anti-competitive consequences. Quite to the contrary, our empirical evidence shows that in the Italian banking industry there is no conflict between competition and concentration.