Journal of the European Economic Association
Bank Branching Strategies in the 1997 Thai Financial Crisis and Local Access to Credit
2026-03-04
The effect of financial crises on bank branch location choices provides an unexplored channel by which crises affect access to credit for many years. We estimate a dynamic structural model of oligopolistic location choice for Thai banks allowing for competitive effects between rival banks. We predict the evolution of branch locations under the counterfactual scenario of no financial crisis in 1997. We find that there would have been 7.2% more branches and 4.8% more markets with at least one branch after 10 years in the absence of the crisis. Furthermore, access to loans would have increased by 7.4 percentage points.