This paper utilizes a new flow measure of the true output of bank services to analyze the impact of mergers on the cost and productivity of Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) over the period 1987-1999. It shows that there are conceptual problems in the output measures used in previous studies, which...

Numerous studies have found that banks exhaust scale economies at low levels of output, but most are based on the estimation of parametric cost functions which misrepresent bank cost. Here we avoid specification error by using nonparametric kernal regression techniques. We modify measures of...

A number of public policy issues turn on whether or not there are scale economies in commercial banking. This paper examines why empirical tests in this area have yielded differing results. Sorting out the different methodological approaches enables us to develop general conclusions on the size...

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