은행산업집중화가 중소기업 은행차입금에 미치는 영향

During the financial crisis, the market concentration of the Korean commercial bank industry increased through a restructuring that it had never experienced before, such as liquidation of insolvent banks and merging between banks. The banking market concentration, which showed the trend of decline until the financial crisis, began to rise from 1998 and the competitive marketplace was transformed into a “moderately concentrated marketplace.” The process of carrying out the policy which let the superior banks take over and merge with insolvent banks drastically reduced the number of banks. As the banks that had been under the protection of the government in the past began to promote scaling up and acquiring subsidiary enterprises, the banking market has been concentrated. As the banking market continues to concentrate, there have been increased concerns about the resulting reduction in competition and the abuses of monopolization from increased market power. From a traditional viewpoint, the reduction in competition can reduce the total loan amount and increase lending interest, thus producing a generally negative economic effect (Pagano, 1993). Recently, however, there have been studies of positive effects of banking market concentration. They report that big banks are more able to discern firms with growth opportunities through producing information and monitoring. Petersen and Rajan (1995) demonstrate that, with banking market concentration, relationship banking is strengthened and the credit availability of small and medium enterprises (hereafter SME) is enlarged, thus alleviating their financial constraints. The size and market power of banks has increased in the process of extensive restructuring of the bank industry during/after the financial crisis. SMEs have large information asymmetry and high dependency on external funds compared to large firms. They may thus be directly affected by the structural changes in the banking market. Yet, there have been no empirical analysis on whether bank loans for bank dependent SMEs have been reduced and thus financing for SMEs has become more difficult due to banking market concentration. The purpose of our paper is to analyze the effect of banking market concentration on SMEs lending. While Park and Kim (2002) uses the total amount of SMEs lending reported by banks, we collect data on the amount of lending at the level of individual firms from their annual reports. We measure the degree of dependence on external financing, and empirically test whether SMEs that are more dependent on external financing have more bank loans in the concentrated banking market. Our sample is SMEs with fewer than 300 full-time equivalent employees listed in the Korean Stock Exchange from 1998 to 2005. Our main results are summarized as follows. First, banks are more likely to make loans on SMEs when the banking market is more concentrated. This result is consistent with the argument of Petersen and Rajan (1995). They present empirical evidence analyzing credit availability for U.S. small businesses, and find that firms are less credit constrained in the more concentrated banking market, and younger firms are charged lower loan rates. Second, we find that the SMEs in more need of external financing have more bank loans in the more concentrated banking market. Cetorelli and Gambera (2001) also show that bank concentration promotes the growth of firms in more need of external financing by facilitating credit access to younger firms. For the robustness of our results, the three-bank concentration ratio (CR3) was used to measure the degree of concentration as well as the Herfindahl-Hershiman index (HHI) for deposit. We also decomposed the sample into sub-samples according to whether a firm uses debt and/or paid-in capital or not, and whether the surplus cash flow of a firm is positive or negative. We obtained consistent results. In sum, this paper explores the empirical relevance of banking market concentration on SMEs lending. It turns out that the increased concentration in the banking sector through the painful restructuring since the financial crisis has not involved a negative effect on SMEs lending in Korea.