Over the past two decades, a variety of deregulatory measures have increased competition in the U.S. commercial banking industry. While increased competitive rivalry creates incentives for banks to operate more efficiently, it also creates incentives for banks to take additional risk,...

Using 2013 and 2016 data, we compare the performance of unsecured consumer loans made by U.S. bank holding companies to that of the fintech lender, LendingClub. We focus on the volume of nonperforming unsecured consumer loans and apply a novel technique developed by Hughes and Moon (2017) that...

We compare the performance of unsecured personal installment loans made by traditional bank lenders with that of LendingClub, using a stochastic frontier estimation technique to decompose the observed nonperforming loans into three components. The first is the best-practice minimum ratio that a...

Fintechs are believed to help expand credit access to underserved consumers without taking on additional risk. We compare the performance efficiency of LendingClub's unsecured personal loans with similar loans originated by banks. Using stochastic frontier estimation, we decompose the observed...

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...

The unique capital structure of commercial banking - funding production with demandable debt that participates in the economy's payments system - affects various aspects of banking. It shapes commercial banks' comparative advantage in providing financial products and services to informationally...