We investigate the relative performance of publicly traded community banks (those with assets less than $10 billion) versus larger banks (those with assets between $10 billion and $50 billion). A body of research has shown that community banks have potential advantages in relationship lending...

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...