This paper examines the technical efficiency of U.S. Federal Reserve check processing offices over 1980-2003. We extend results from Park et al. (2000) and Daouia and Simar (2007) to develop an unconditional, hyperbolic, amp;#945;-quantile estimator of efficiency. Our new estimator is fully...

Continued consolidation of the U.S. banking industry and a general increase in the size of banks has prompted some policymakers to consider policies that discourage banks from getting larger, including explicit caps on bank size. However, limits on the size of banks could entail economic costs...

Advances in information-processing technology have significantly eroded the advantages of small scale and proximity to customers that traditionally enabled community banks and other small-scale lenders to thrive. Nonetheless, U.S. credit unions have experienced increasing membership and market...

The Lerner index is widely used to assess firms' market power. However, estimation and interpretation present several challenges, especially for banks, which tend to produce multiple outputs and operate with considerable inefficiency. We estimate Lerner indices for U.S. banks for 2001-18 using...

This paper examines the determinants of individual bank failures and acquisitions in the United States during 1984-1993. We use bank-specific information suggested by examiner CAMEL-rating categories to estimate competing-risks hazard models with time-varying covariates. We focus especially on...

Numerous studies have found that US commercial banks are quite inefficient, and we find that, on average, banks became more technically inefficient between 1984 and 1993. Our analysis of productivity change, however, shows that technological improvements adopted by a few banks pushed out the...