Title: Measurement and Analysis of the Micro Market Structure of China's Banking Industry: 2003-2022

Speaker: Liu Yan, Associate Professor of the Business School, Sun Yat-sen University; concurrently serves as Deputy Director of the Financial Big Data Research Center of Wuhan University. His main research fields are macroeconomics, financial intermediation theory, money and banking, and corporate finance. He presides over the "China Banking Database (CBD)" project and a number of National Natural Science Foundation research projects, and participates in a number of major and key research projects such as the Ministry of Science and Technology Key R&D Program, National Natural Science Foundation Key Projects, and National Social Science Major Projects as a sub-project leader or core member. He has published nearly 30 papers in domestic and foreign authoritative journals such as People's Daily·Internal Reference, Economic Research Journal, Review of Economic Studies and Journal of International Economics. He won the first PwC3535 Annual Best Paper Award in 2020 and the Best Paper Award of the China Finance Annual Meeting twice.

Abstract: The banking market structure at the prefecture-level city level reflects the local banking competition situation, which is of great significance to economic development and financial stability. Due to the lack of systematic data on the scale of various banks at the prefecture-level city level, the measurement of the micro market structure of China's banking industry has long relied solely on the number of branches. This paper combines a comprehensive bank-level scale database, bank branch data including exited institutions, and aggregated bank scale data of 367 prefecture-level administrative regions across the country, and measures the assets, liabilities, loans and deposits of all banks in each prefecture-level city by solving a quadratic optimization problem with 100,000 variables and constraints. It also compares with the real bank-prefecture-level city scale data from the Provincial Financial Yearbook to verify the accuracy of the measurement results. On this basis, it measures multi-dimensional market structure indicators of China's banking industry at the prefecture-level city level. It is found that the market concentration of China's banking industry decreased significantly from 2004 to 2016, remained stable since 2016, and has been significantly lower than that of the United States and Europe. It also uses specific examples to illustrate how bank micro market structure data can be combined with bank, regional and enterprise micro data to carry out empirical research.

Date & time: 10 June 2025, 14:30 - 16:00

Venue: B321, Zhixin Building, Central Campus, Shandong University