The Industrial Organization Of Banking PDF Download

This thesis contains three chapters exploring topics related to industrial organization and banking. The first chapter studies how banks compete through interest rates and credit rationing in the U.S. mortgage market. I estimate a structural model of bank competition in interest rates and credit rationing using U.S. mortgage data. I use the estimated model to show how banks optimally trade-off interest rates and credit rationing, and illustrate its policy relevance by examining the magnitude and the form of banks' pass through -- to clients -- of a cut in funding costs. I find that banks pass through their lower funding cost by not only cutting interest rates but also relaxing credit rationing. There is substantial heterogeneity in the pass through in both margins and this is mainly explained by heterogeneity in two different types of banks' costs: funding cost of originating mortgages and cost of processing applications. The second chapter surveys recent papers using structural models to study lending markets from an industrial organization perspective. I show that the papers can be divided into two modeling and estimation frameworks: the discrete choice, differentiated product model framework and the search model framework. The discrete choice model framework is based on seminal work by Einav, Jenkins, and Levin (2012) and is used to study how issues related to adverse selection, moral hazard, and market structure affect lending market outcomes. The search model framework, on the other hand, encompasses a variety of approaches focusing on how search frictions affect lending outcomes. I compare and contrast the two different frameworks and also suggest areas for future research. The third chapter studies the factors that drive mortgage securitization in the U.S. I combine a multinomial probit model of mortgage securitization with unique application-level mortgage data to study how loan- and bank-level characteristics affect bank securitization incentives. Overall, I find that lower mortgage quality and higher bank resource constraints lead to higher mortgage securitization by banks.