Ultimate ownership and bank competition

Resumen:
We document substantial time-series and cross-sectional variation in branch-level deposit account interest rates, maintenance fees, and fee thresholds, and examine whether variation in bank concentration helps explain variation in these prices. Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) alone is not correlated with any of the outcome variables. A generalized HHI (GHHI) capturing both common ownership (the degree to which banks are commonly owned by the same investors) and cross-ownership (the extent to which banks own shares in each other), is strongly correlated with all prices, even when we limit cross-sectional variation in bank ownership to only that predicted by the growth of index funds.