Banking Bigness: Concentration of the World’s 50 Largest Banks Available to Purchase

Industrial concentration is broadly defined as: a few firms controlling a substantial share (assets, revenues) of the market. In the banking sector, this paper shows that the largest 50 banks in the world control about 50 percent of assets of the largest 1,000 banks. Two well known indexes of concentration were used (the Herfindahl and Theil’s entropy) to check the levels of concentration between 1990 and 2002. For purposes of robustness, the world’s largest 100 banks were also investigated. It was found in both cases that the concentration in 2002 was statistically significant as compared to concentration in the previous decade