Do checking accounts help banks monitor borrowers? If they do, the rationale both for allowing regulated providers of liquidity to also make risky loans to commercial borrowers and for the government's providing deposit insurance becomes clearer. Using a unique set of data that includes monthly...

To explain persistence of credit card interest rates at relatively high levels, Calem and Mester (AER, 1995) argued that informational barriers create switching costs for high-balance customers. As evidence, using data from the 1989 Survey of Consumer Finances, they showed that these households...

The authors empirically examine the hypothesis that access to deposits with inelastic rates (core deposits) permits a bank to make contractual agreements with borrowers that are infeasible if the bank must pay market rates for its funds. Access to core deposits insulates a bank's costs of funds...

With seemingly minor amendments to the standard techniques of measuring banking technology, we have uncovered important empirical phenomena that point to the crucial role played by financial capital in banking and financial intermediation. The authors employ a standard cost function, conditioned...

Estimates of bank cost efficiency can be biased if bank heterogeneity is ignored. The author compares X-inefficiency measures derived from a model that constrains the cost frontier to be the same for all banks in the nation and a model that allows the cost functions and error terms to differ...

The authors investigate the effects of technological change, deregulation, and dynamic changes in competition on the performance of U.S. banks. The authors' most striking result is that during 1991-1997, cost productivity worsened while profit productivity improved substantially, particularly...

The authors argue for a shift in the focus of modeling production from the traditional assumptions of profit maximization and cost minimization to a more general assumption of managerial utility maximization that can incorporate risk incentives into the analysis of production and recover...