Information asymmetry and market power in the African banking industry

The following findings have been established from non-interactive regressions. First, the effects of information sharing offices are significant in Two Stage Least Squares, with a positive effect from private credit bureaus. Second, the GMM results suggest that public credit registries increase market power. Third, from Quintile Regressions, private credit bureaus consistently increase market power throughout the conditional distributions of market power. Given that the above findings are contrary to theoretical postulations, we extend the analytical framework with interactive regressions in order to assess whether the anticipated effects can be established if information sharing offices are increased. Our extended findings show a negative net effect from public credit registries on market power in GMM regressions, and negative net impacts from public credit registries on market power in the 0.25th and 0.50th quartiles of market power.