China is reforming its banking system, partially privatizing and permitting minority foreign ownership of three of the dominant 'big four' state-owned banks. This paper seeks to help predict the effects of this change by analysing the efficiency of virtually all Chinese banks in the years...

This paper investigates the effects of focus versus diversification on bank performance using data on Chinese banks during the 1996-2006 period. We construct a new measure, economies of diversi-fication, and compare the results to those of the more conventional focus indices, which are based on...