The recent literature on measuring bank performance indicates a preference for sophisticated techniques over simple accounting ratios. We explore the results and relationships between bank efficiency estimates using accounting ratios and Data Envelope Analysis (DEA) with bootstrap among Jamaican...

The existing Chinese banking system was born out of a state-planning framework focussed on the funding of state-owned enterprises. Despite the development of a modern banking system, numerous studies of Chinese banking point to its high level of average inefficiency. Much of this inefficiency...

1) Are Italian mutual banks efficient? Evidence from two different cost frontier techniques, by Juan Sergio Lopez, Alessandra Appenini, and Stefania P.S. Rossi. The aim of the first paper is to analyze the efficiency of co-operative banks in Italy. The increasing competition induced by the...

This paper investigates the dynamics between the financial freedom counterparts of the economic freedom index drawn from the Heritage Foundation database and bank efficiency levels. We rely on a large sample of commercial banks operating in the 27 European Union member states over the 2000s....

I examine the relationship between bank efficiency and market power to test the quiet life hypothesis for a sample of 419 Latin American commercial banks between 1985 and 2010. A two-stage least squares model with instrumental variables controls for the simultaneous relationship between...

In response to the financial crisis of 2008, the global banking industry has been undergoing fundamental regulatory changes, imposed by the Basel III Agreement, the 2010 US Dodd-Frank Act and the introduction of a new European supervisory structure. This paper analyses the possible long-term...

We investigate bank risk taking, efficiency and their relation to law enforcement using a unique sample of 133 Chinese city commercial banks across 31 regions for the 1999–2008 period. We find that stronger law enforcement tends to promote greater bank risk taking in the region. Furthermore,...

According to a frequently cited finding by Berger et al (1993), X-inefficiency contributes 20% to cost-inefficiency in western banks. Empirical studies of Chinese banks tend to place cost-inefficiency in the region of 50%. Such estimates would suggest that Chinese banks suffer from gross cost...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of business and financial specific regulations on banks in the EU-27 over the 2004–2010 period. We employ a dataset of a wide range of business regulation indices from the “Doing Business” project of the World Bank. Results for the...

This article examines the loan rate-setting behavior of German banks for a large variety of retail and corporate loan products. We find that a bank's operational efficiency is priced in bank loan rates and alters interest-setting behavior. Specifically, we establish that a higher degree of...