This paper examines the performance of the U.S.~commercial banking industry over 1984--2002. Rather than measuring performance relative to the unknown (and difficult-to-estimate) boundary of the production set, performance for a given bank is measured relative to {\it expected} maximum output...

Advances in information-processing technology have eroded the advantages of small scale and proximity to customers that traditionally enabled small lenders to thrive. Nonetheless, the membership and market share of US credit unions have increased, though their average size has also risen. We...

This paper seeks to identify the characteristics that make individual U.S. banks more likely to fail or be acquired. We use bank-specific information to estimate competing-risks hazard models with time-varying covariates. We use alternative measures of productive efficiency to proxy management...