This study examines the productivity growth of the nationwide banks of China and a sample of city commercial, banks for the eleven years to 2007. Estimates of total factor productivity growth are constructed with appropriate confidence intervals, using a bootstrap method for the Malmquist index....

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...

This study addresses the cost structure and operational efficiency of the credit departments of the farmers' associations in Taiwan, adopting both stochastic cost frontier analysis and data envelopment analysis. The factors that influence operational efficiency are also examined. In particular,...

Using a unique bank-level dataset on the Ugandan banking system over the period 1999 to 2005, we explore the factors behind consistently high interest rate spreads and margins. While foreign banks charge lower interest rate spreads, we do not find a robust and economically significant...

This paper examines the impact of non-traditional activities on the China banking sector's technical and scale efficiency during the post-reform period 2000-2005. The paper follows the procedures set by Isik and Hassan (2003) by omitting the off-balance sheet items first, before adding it as an...

An empirical investigation of the relationship between market share or concentration and return on equity or assets provides evidence for the existence of a profit-structure relationship in the European banking sector. Testing several market-power and efficient-structure theories reveals that...

We study whether bank efficiency is related to bank ownership in Russia. We find that foreign banks are more efficient than domestic private banks and – surprisingly – that domestic private banks are not more efficient than domestic public banks. These results are not driven by the choice of...

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...

Per unit bank operating costs are found to vary significantly across Asian countries and over time. The strong correlation between per unit labor cost and physical capital cost suggests that there exist systematic differences in bank operating efficiency across countries. The declining operating...

In this paper we assess the impact of financial disintermediation on bank efficiency, with a focus on securitisation and bank-managed funds. For that purpose we use Banco de Portugal's proprietary database, which combines both accounting and statistical data for each single bank operating in...