The Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and the Great Recession of 2007-2009 are now in the past. Again there was the debt crisis of 2010-11. During the worst of the recent financial crisis/Great Recession many observers made comparisons between that event and the Great Depression. The lecture...

This paper attempts to examine technical efficiency and productivity performance of Indian scheduled commercial banks, for the period 1979-2008. A model is constructed using multiple output/multiple input technology production frontier using semiparametric estimation methods. The endogenity of...

In the early transition era in Russia entry barriers for commercial banks were about absent. It resulted in the mushrooming of hundreds of small, poorly-endowed and inexperienced banks. In this paper we address the question whether the claimed benefits of low entry barriers - competition and...