This paper begins with a discussion of the influence of the number of firms and the variance of market shares on the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) measure of market concentration. ; The paper then reports the changes in the number of depository institutions (DIs) and in the HHI in the Twelfth District and its 65 individual urban banking markets between 1982 and 1992, attributing these changes to underlying causes. I find that, although an increase in concentration need not accompany a decrease in firms, more than two-thirds of the 53 markets with DI decreases showed concentration increases. This suggests that regulatory review of DI mergers has been and will continue to be important in assuring the competitiveness of banking markets.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in its journal Economic Review.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)