DE

In this press kit, you will find a selection of the European Parliament’s press releases reflecting MEPs’ priorities for topics on the summit agenda. Source : © European Union, 2024 - EP

• Abstract
  This paper extends Boone (2008) by introducing a competition measure at the individual
  firm level rather than for an entire market segment.
• We apply this extended Boone indicator to individual bank-level competition
  in the loan market in the four largest euro area countries and Austria.
• Our new measure of firm-level competition enriches and complements
  other competition measures and provides a promising starting point for future market
  power analyses.
• The only measure among non-structural measures that is based on the
  concept of competition as a process of rivalry is the Boone (2008) indicator.
• We introduce
  a new performance measure of competition by extending the Boone indicator to the
  individual firm level.
• Introduction
  The ability to reliably measure competition is valuable to researchers, analysts, and
  policymakers, especially antitrust authorities, financial supervisors, and central banks.
• One broad
  category of indicators often used to measure competition are structural competition
  measures, such as static concentration measures, and dynamic measures, e.g., entry and
  exit rates.
• Out of these measures, the only measure based on the
  concept of competition as a process of rivalry is the Boone indicator.
• This study introduces a new performance measure of competition by extending the
  Boone indicator to the individual firm level.
• It thus measures the
  increase in profits in percent of one percentage point increase in efficiency, with marginal
  costs as measure of efficiency.
• We extend the theoretical
  underpinning of the measurement of competition for the entire market of Boone (2008) by
  a new measure of individual firm-level competition.
• A concern of the literature is the gap
  between the practical application and the theoretical framework of Boone (2008).
• We introduce within the same theoretical
  framework a new measure of competition on firm level, the MRP.
• Our new
  measure significantly augments the antitrust evaluative framework by shedding light on
  whether a merger results in a less competitive market.
• Our novel indicator focuses on
  firms? incentives to enhance their relative efficiency, as manifested in the elasticity
  between relative profits and efficiency.
• However, an inefficient firm that is foreclosed could be more
  competitive than the larger efficient firm that relies on its scale economies.
• Our new metric of competition unveils
  banks? ability to influence their profitability in the short term by cutting costs relative to
  their peers.
• The new MRP indicator provides the ability to assess the impact
  of individual banks? competitiveness on their interest rate-setting behaviour in loan
  markets.
• Incorporating this information promises a more refined understanding of the impact and
  timing of monetary policy rates changes on the real economy.
• Section 3 introduces within the Boone
  (2008) theoretical framework our new measure of individual firm-level competition,
  including the interpretation of the MRP.
• Section 4 provides an application of our new
  ECB Working Paper Series No 2925

  6

  individual firm-level competition measure to the loan market.

• The StructureConduct-Performance paradigm (SCP) provides a traditional framework in the field of
  industrial organization for analysing competition behaviour in markets.
• Concentrated
  markets ease the possibilities to collude implicitly or explicitly and therefore concentrated
  markets result in higher prices and profits.
• For example, a tougher competition
  setup may lead to a reallocation of market shares, potentially forcing some firms to exit
  the market.
• This approach gives firms? strategic behaviour
  central stage and focuses on the strategic interaction on prices and quantities, known as
  conjectural variation.
• Another measure from
  this strand of literature is the H-statistic developed by Panzar and Rosse (1987).
• The only competition measure from this performance literature where competition is the
  outcome from a process of rivalry is the Boone indicator.
• A continuous and monotonically increasing relationship exists between
  RPD and the level of competition if firms are ranked by decreasing efficiency.
• (2013) compare the Boone indicator with the price-cost margin
  and conclude that the profit elasticity is a more reliable measure of competition.
• The high
  elasticity of profits to efficiency unequivocally indicates that the high market shares and
  therefore high profits are due to high efficiency.
• A firm that quickly passes changes to the input prices is seen as a price
  taker with little market power.
• Indicators of competition tend to measure different phenomenon and may provide
  conflicting messages, as reported for European banking by Carbo et al.
• Application 2: Test the ?quiet life? and related market structure hypotheses using the
  MRP as competition or market structure measure.
• Data
  Our application to individual bank-level competition in the euro area loan market uses
  balance sheet and income statement data from the Moody?s Analytics BankFocus for the
  calendar years 2013-2020.
• As such, most publications
  on competition in the euro area includes the largest four member states.
• Due to these restrictions the database was reduced to an unbalanced panel of up to 1862
  banks (depending on the year) from five euro area countries.
• Application 1: Measure bank competition using MRP
  Looking at the distribution of the MRP for individual banks (Fig.
• A similar finding for the four largest euro area countries as a group is
  reported in Carbo et al.
• Application 2: Test of market structure hypotheses using MRP
  Our new measure of individual-bank competition can be used to test market structure
  theories.
• Euro area banks? market power,
  lending channel and stability: the effects of negative policy rates, European Central Bank
  Working Paper, 2790 (February).
• A
  new approach to measuring competition in the loan markets of the euro area, Applied
  Economics, 43 (23), 3155?3167.
• Impact of bank competition on the interest rate pass-through in the euro area, Applied
  Economics, 45 (11), 1359?1380.

• Dr Peter Podesser, CEO of SFC Energy AG: “After record operating figures in 2021 and 2022, fiscal year 2023 continues seamlessly with new records.
• For the first time, our sales exceeded the EUR 100 million mark, coming to EUR 118,148 thousand (2022: EUR 85,229 thousand).
• At the same time, we grew profitably in an economically challenging environment, something that is not a matter of course in our sector.
• Overall, Group sales were thus even higher in 2023 than the forecast range of EUR 115,000 thousand to EUR 117,000 thousand, which had been adjusted upwards in November 2023.