The recent decline in the Federal Reserve’s check volumes has received a lot of attention. Although switching to electronic payments methods and electronic check-processing has been credited for much of that decline, some of it could be caused by changes following bank mergers involving...

This paper utilizes a new flow measure of the true output of bank services to analyze the impact of mergers on the cost and productivity of Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) over the period 1987-1999. It shows that there are conceptual problems in the output measures used in previous studies, which...

Concern with the potential effect of bank mergers on small business lending has stemmed from a belief that larger acquirers may be less willing than their smaller targets to be active in the small business lending market. However, we find that in roughly half the commercial and savings bank...