| Abstrakt: |
The paper examines the impact of bank risk-taking behaviour and market power on efficiency within the East African community. Comprehensive types of risk-taking behaviour include credit risk, liquidity risk, capital risk and insolvency risk, while structural and non-structural measures of market power are employed. Unlike previous studies, bank efficiency is decomposed into technical, pure technical, scale, cost and revenue efficiency. Using a two-step system GMM on 149 banks with 1,805 observations over the period 2001-2018, the findings reveal that the effect of bank risk-taking behaviour varies depending on the type of efficiency and existing market structure. Market power is observed to precede all types of bank efficiency, thus supporting the concentration-efficiency hypothesis that banks with greater market power are more efficient. Overall, reduced bank risk-taking behaviour and greater market power leads to more bank efficiency. The results present potentially important policy recommendations for bank risks, market power and efficiency. |
