Beginning in 1933, with the establishment of the first federally chartered savings and loan, the thrift industry has functioned under a dual regulatory system. This paper addresses the question of whether this moral hazard, created by regulatory competition, increased the resolution costs of...

Over the 1990s European banking markets became increasingly deregulated as European unification progressed. National borders become less relevant, and product line restrictions diminished, increasing competitive pressures on institutions to operate more efficiently. A stochastic frontier cost...

This article proposes the use of finite mixtures of probability distributions to estimate cost functions. The mixture technique allows for the simultaneous existence and unobservability of multiple technologies of production. Technology switching by firms and conventional technical change can be...

Deregulation during the 1980s allowed savings and loan associations to undertake many of the same activities as mutual savings banks, so that competition among thrifts increased, and they became more homogeneous in nature. At the same time, according to agency theory, mutual institutions should...