Abstract
How does competition affect innovation in the banking industry? We use the 1994 Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act as a major exogenous shock on U.S. banking industry competition and study its impact on innovation. Addressing this issue is challenging however because traditionally banks do not report research and development expenses and most often do not patent their new product/service developments. Classic measures of innovation are therefore not available. Consequently, we start by introducing a new measure of innovation, denoted PSV for Product Similarity Variability, based on the Hoberg and Phillips (2010) measure of product similarity score, and report numerous results that confirm its validity. Thanks to the availability of the Hoberg and Phillips (2010) measure for financial institutions and banks in particular, our PSV measure of innovation unlocks the doors to investigations into the relation between competition and innovation in the banking industry. We proceed by implementing differences-in-differences tests around the Riegle-Neal Act adoptions at states level. Our results suggest that competition has a negative but transitory impact on innovation in the banking industry.
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