This paper analyzes the productive differences of banking among countries. It proposes a Malmquist type index that allows intercountry productivity differences to be broken down into pure technological differences and differences due to environmental effects. The most relevant feature of this...

We use a sample of 4,960 observations from 752 publicly quoted commercial banks operating in 87 countries between 1999 and 2006 and estimate cost efficiency and alternative profit efficiency using a global best-practice frontier while controlling for cross-country differences in regulations,...

Recent cross-country comparisons of bank efficiency have been based on pooled estimates of banks across countries and have typically assumed a common frontier and that differences in performance among banks are primarily due to disparities in certain country-specific aspects of banking...

The paper investigates the operating efficiency differences of a sample of commercial banks across 10 European countries. First, the paper analyzes the technical efficiency of each country sample following the “basic” Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model incorporating only banking...

Diversified and focused business models may affect foreign bank efficiency differently. We investigate whether there is an optimal business model along three business dimensions—assets, funding and income—and which business model is optimal for foreign banks in a financial center....