Korea’s financial system used to be bank-based, with banks playing the leading role in financing corporations. As highlighted by Park et al. (2019), however, bond markets have developed rapidly in Korea and other Asian countries. The corporate bond market competes with banks as a source of finance for large borrowers. As such, bond markets may affect banking sector operation, a process known as disintermediation. In this paper, we examine whether bond market development improves the efficiency of resource allocation in Korean bank lending. We propose two channels through which bond market development affects the efficiency of bank lending. Since the two channels have opposing effects on the efficiency of banking, the issue must be settled by empirical analysis. We find that bank loans are much less efficient than bond financing in allocating resources across industries. Furthermore, banks are particularly inefficient in resource allocation in industries that rely more on bond financing. This suggests that competition from bond financing does not improve allocative efficiency of bank loans.

韩国的金融体系过去以银行为基础，而银行在融资公司中起着主导作用。正如Park等人所强调的。（2019），然而，韩国和其他亚洲国家的债券市场发展迅速。公司债券市场与银行竞争，是大型借款人的融资来源。因此，债券市场可能会影响银行业的运作，这一过程称为“脱媒”。在本文中，我们研究了债券市场的发展是否可以提高韩国银行贷款的资源配置效率。我们提出了两个渠道，债券市场的发展会通过这些渠道影响银行贷款的效率。由于这两个渠道对银行业的效率产生相反的影响，因此必须通过经验分析解决该问题。我们发现，在跨行业分配资源方面，银行贷款的效率远低于债券融资的效率。此外，在更多依赖债券融资的行业中，银行的资源分配效率尤其低下。这表明来自债券融资的竞争并不能提高银行贷款的分配效率。