The Boone indicator measured at the federal state level captures exactly this characteristic
of bank market competition. Another important issue in empirical studies analyzing
the relation between risk taking and bank competition is identifying the correct measure
of bank risk. Most bank-level studies proxy bank risk with either some sort of credit
risk (i.e., the ratio of non-performing loans over loans), or by the z-score introduced by
Boyd and Runkle (1993). While the z-score can be interpreted as the number of standard
deviations by which a bank is removed from insolvency, the non-performing loans ratio
focuses on credit risk only. However, neither of these risk indicators considers actual bank
distress and bank failure events, which are without doubt the most appropriate concepts
to define bank risk. Our measurement of bank risk is comprised from the distress database
collected by the German central bank. This dataset contains information on bank-level
distress events that range from weak incidences to forced exit by means of restructuring
mergers or bank moratoria. Hence, our measurement of bank risk directly captures the possibility of outright bank defaults. We are not aware of any study employing actual
failure events as dependent variable to investigate the competition-bank risk nexus and we
believe this is an important step forward toward a better understanding of the underlying
mechanisms. Our paper is structured as follows: in Section 2 we present the data and the
methodological approaches to measuring bank competition at different contextual levels
and to analyzing the bank risk taking-competition nexus. In Section 3 we present the
main results of our empirical model before concluding in Section 4.