We investigate the sources of recent changes in the performance of U.S. banks using concepts and techniques borrowed from the cross-section efficiency literature. Our most striking result is that during 1991-1997, cost productivity worsened while profit productivity improved substantially,...

Our research as well as that by other authors has found scale economies at all sizes of banks and the largest scale economies at the largest banks – that is, larger banks are able to provide products at lower average cost than smaller banks. While the earlier literature found that scale...