Ten years of deregulation, new technology, and increase competition have made the U.S. banking industry a less hospital place for many community banks. But the consensus view among ten community bankers recently surveyed by the Federal Reserve is that rapid industry change has provided...

How do we measure in the banking industry? This article provides an overview of the methodology currently used in competitive analysis and highlights an alternative techniques that could be used to complement this methodology. Given the ongoing process of consolidation in U.S. banking, assessing...

After stagnating for many years, the rate of new bank formation increased sharply in the second half of the 1990s. The financial press attributes this development to the high volume of bank mergers, which are said to have encouraged new entry by reducing service to some bank customers. It is...

The banking industry has undergone substantial consolidation during the last 15 years, and that process has accelerated in the 1990s. One effect of this consolidation has been to greatly reduce the number of independent and locally owned banks. Some banks have been acquired by distant banking...

The merger boom in the U.S. banking industry has caused the number of banking organizations in the nation to fall by nearly a third since 1990. Most of this contraction has involved small community banks. ; A common perception is that most of these small banks are being absorbed by large banks....

Bank mergers have attracted much attention during the last year due to a surge in mergers among the nation's largest banking companies. The consolidation of the banking industry has been going on much longer, however. Since the early 1980s, the number of banking organizations has fallen by more...

This paper utilizes a new flow measure of the true output of bank services to analyze the impact of mergers on the cost and productivity of Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) over the period 1987-1999. It shows that there are conceptual problems in the output measures used in previous studies, which...