This study examines how small and medium-size enterprises' (SMEs') lending and credit guarantee affect Korean banks' efficiency, by employing the stochastic frontier approach on 14 banks over the period 2001-2010. When lending increases to SMEs, the findings indicate that banks' cost efficiency...

<title>Abstract</title> This study explores the impacts of bank's diversified operations on their loans, the threshold effect of bank's derivatives trading and the impacts on their financial behaviors are investigated. The results show that there are two separate regime effects for banks in large-sized and...