Efficiency and Resilience of French Multinational Banks: Evidence From the Pre‐Euro Era

Large French banks have restructured over the last two decades responding to the evolution of the French banking system, European union integration, and globalization. Using financial time‐series and cross‐sectional data of three major French banks (Societe Generale, BNP Paribas, and Credit Lyonnais) from 1993 to 1999, this paper analyzes their performance. Our findings indicate that the French banks’ performance (return on equity capital ratio) was influenced negatively by total assets, the efficiency ratio, the Tier‐1 capital ratio, and loan loss provisions, but not at all influenced by non‐interest income (contrary to our hypothesis). When the French banks were compared their global counterparts, common factors explaining the performance of these banks are efficiency and total assets in at least 3 of the 6 countries.