The Effect of Bank Competition on the Cost of Credit: Empirical Evidence from the Visegrad Countries

The effects of bank competition on the cost of credit are a much-debated topic in Small and Medium enterprises financing. In this paper, we would like to examine the relationship between the cost of credit and interbank-competition in the context of Visegrad countries - the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic. The dataset of this paper comes from two different sources, the firm level data provided by the latest version of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey that was conducted by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank during 2012 to 2014, and the country level bank competition measures are collected from the Global Financial Database, updated in 2017 [3]. We have examined bank competition with four measures, including structural bank concentration measure and three non-structural (Lerner Index, H-Statistics, and Boone Index) measures. We find evidence that bank competition has a positive effect on the cost of credit and hence, our results are in-line with prior literature on information-based theories of bank competition. We have also assessed the firms in terms of their information opacity (micro, small, and medium), and we find that the cost of credit is higher for the information opaque firms. Thus, firm sizes have important implications for bank competition and cost of credit.