This paper examines the common factors that drive the returns of U.S. bank holding companies from 1997 to 2005. We … that the market factor clearly dominates in explaining bank returns, followed by the Fama-French factors. The bank … tend to load in the same direction on the first component. Relative to the returns of large firms in other sectors, bank …

financial services, the number of U.S. bank branches has continued to increase steadily over time. Further, an increasing … lower bank-average deposits per branch and roughly equal volumes of small business loans per branch, but no reduction in net …-sized branch networks had lower bank-average deposits and small business loan volume per branch, but had lower net deposit costs …