The paper examines the effect of foreign capital entry on the cost and profit structure of commercial banking in Thailand with using a bank-level panel data in 1999 - 2014. We distinguish the dimensions of the market-level effect and the individual bank-level effect in foreign entry and find that an increase of bank-level foreign ownership results in increase of interest rate spread and improvement of loan quality, but at the same time, increase of operational expenses. On the other hand, the market-level foreign bank entry brings an increase of interest rate spread, non-interest income and reduce of operation expenses, realizing higher ROA as a result. Overall, foreign bank entry improves banking performance
