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,...

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...

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...

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...

Cost functions and cost efficiency are commonly estimated for industries with detailed data on production and cost, both for firms that are for profit as well as not for profit. The data on not-for-profits obtained from the IRS Form 990 lack these details and, consequently, encourage...