Assessing Bank Competition for Consumer Loans

Abstract

We assess the competitiveness of the $400 billion dollar U.S. bank consumer loan market by comparing results from different competition measures-HHI, Lerner Index, H-Statistic along with three others, two of which are related to frontier analysis. These measures are typically weakly related to one another and only half of them identify banks with the highest loan price and spread as also being the least competitive. This is the opposite of what would be expected. The states where the most and least competitive banks are located are noted. The most populous states with the largest banks are underrepresented.