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,...

Bank consolidation is a global phenomenon. It may enhance the value of firms in the industry if, for example, it is driven by scale and scope economies, but skeptics often accuse bankers of sacrificing value to build empires. Using data on bank holding companies in the U.S., we find strong...

By eliminating the influence of statistical noise, stochastic frontier techniques permit the estimation of the best-practice value of a firmś investment opportunities and the magnitude of a firmś systematic failure to achieve its best-practice market value - a gauge of the magnitude of agency...