Trends of cost efficiency in response to financial deregulation : The case of Indian banks

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the trends of cost efficiency (CE) of Indian banks in response to financial deregulation programme launched in early 1990s. More specifically, the findings of this paper offer empirical testing of the basic underlined hypothesis that the CE of banks will rise in the more liberal and competitive environment. Design/methodology/approach – The study employs input-oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) models that incorporate the quasi-fixed inputs to compute the cost, technical, and allocative efficiency scores for individual banks. The unbalanced panel data spanning from the financial year 1992-1993 to 2007-2008 are used for obtaining efficiency measures. In addition, the panel data Tobit model has been applied to investigate the bank-specific factors explaining variations in the CE. Findings – The empirical findings pertaining to the trends of efficiency measures suggest that: first, deregulation programme has had a positive impact on the CE of Indian banks, and the observed increase in CE is entirely due to improvements in technical efficiency (TE); second, the ranking of ownership groups provides that public sector banks are more cost efficient along with the foreign than private banks; and third, there is a strong presence of global advantage hypothesis in the Indian banking industry. The results of post-DEA analysis reveal that size and exposure to off-balance sheet activities are the key determinants of CE. The results also support the existence of bad luck or bad management hypothesis in Indian banking industry. Practical implications – The practical implication of the research findings is that the financial deregulation programme seems to be successful in achieving the CE gains in the Indian banking industry. This explicitly signals that the cautious approach of banking reforms adopted by Indian policy makers has started bearing fruit in terms of the creation of an efficient banking system, which is immune to any sort of financial crisis, and resilient to both internal and external shocks. Originality/value – The present study offers new evidence on the time-series properties of cost, allocative, and TEs of Indian banks. The DEA models used in this study explicitly incorporate the equity as a quasi-fixed input, which accounts for “risk” in the bank efficiency measurement.