A bank can be viewed as a firm that uses deposits as inputs to “produce” loans and investments. If a manager does all her best, the bank affords its production possibilities frontier. However, the manager’s incentives may not go in-line with those of the bank’s owners, and this leads to...

Inefficient management is considered as a major factor responsible both for bank failures and X-inefficiency. Using data from financial statements of largest Russian banks for the period immediately preceeding the August 1998 crisis, we tested the hypothesis that the past level of X-inefficiency...