A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization based approach to large data sets for European and U.S. banks, we offer new empirical evidence that efficiency plays a key role in the transmission from competition to soundness....

In Germany a public discussion on the power of banks has been going on for decades now with the term power having at least two meanings. On the one hand, it denotes the power of banks to control public corporations through direct shareholdings or the exercise of proxy votes - this is the power...

The analysis highlights the aspects of diversified market structures and of local, low-distance banking as advantageous for financial stability. Heterogeneity protects from uniform market behaviour. Local banking can better overcome the problem of asymmetric information, particular in SME...

According to a frequently cited finding by Berger et al (1993), X-inefficiency contributes 20% to cost-inefficiency in western banks. Empirical studies of Chinese banks tend to place cost-inefficiency in the region of 50%. Such estimates would suggest that Chinese banks suffer from gross cost...

Deregulation, re-regulation and continuing globalisation embody an imperative that banks increase efficiency in order to survive. We employ the Simar-Wilson (2007) two-step double bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis method to measure whether cost efficiency among Jamaican banks has improved...

This study demarcates cost-inefficiency in Chinese banks into X-inefficiency and rent-seeking-inefficiency. A protected banking market not only encourages weak management and X-inefficiency but also public ownership and state directed lending encourages moral hazard and bureaucratic rent...

Deregulation, re-regulation and continuing globalisation embody an imperative that banks increase efficiency to survive. We employ non-parametric bootstrap DEA to measure technical efficiency among Jamaican banks between 1998 and 2007. In addition, we test for conditional convergence to identify...

The recent literature on measuring bank performance indicates a preference for sophisticated techniques over simple accounting ratios. We explore the results and relationships between bank efficiency estimates using accounting ratios and Data Envelope Analysis (DEA) with bootstrap among Jamaican...

Over last two decades, emerging and developing nations have desperately endeavored for efficient banking sectors. In this study, we argue that bank efficiency generates incentives that can impact banks' capital holdings and the cost of financial intermediation. Analyzing a panel dataset of 1190...