We offer and test two competing hypotheses for the consolidation trend in banking using U.S. banking industry data over the period 1982-2000. Under the efficiency hypothesis, technological progress improved the performance of large, multimarket firms relative to small, single-market firms,...

We examine the efficiency effects of the integration of the financial services industry and suggest directions for future research. We also propose a relatively broad working definition of integration and employ U.S. and European data on financial service industry M&As to illustrate several...

We test hypotheses about the effects of bank size, foreign ownership, and distress on lending to informationally opaque small firms using a rich new data set on Argentinean banks, firms, and loans. We also test hypotheses about borrowing from a single bank versus multiple banks. Our results...

We compare the timeliness and accuracy of government supervisors versus market participants in assessing the condition of large U.S. bank holding companies. We find that supervisors and bond rating agencies both have some prior information that is useful to the other. In contrast, supervisory...

We investigate the sources of recent changes in the performance of U.S. banks using concepts and techniques borrowed from the cross-section efficiency literature. Our most striking result is that during 1991-1997, cost productivity worsened while profit productivity improved substantially,...