"We review how deregulation, technological advance, and increased competitive rivalry have affected the size and health of the U.S. community banking sector and the quality and availability of banking products and services. We then develop a simple theoretical framework for analyzing how these...

We test whether the gains from hiring an outside manager exceed the principal-agent costs of owner-manager separation at 266 small, closely held U.S. commercial banks. Our results suggest that hiring an outside manager can improve a bank's profit efficiency, but that these gains depend on...

We assess the effects of geographic expansion on bank efficiency using cost and profit efficiency for over 7,000 U.S. banks, 1993-1998. We find that parent organizations exercise some control over the efficiency of their affiliates, although this control tends to dissipate with distance to the...

Despite operating under substantial regulatory constraints, we find that commercial banks manage their investments largely consistent with the predictions of portfolio choice models with capital market imperfections. Based on 1990-2002 data for small (assets less than $1 billion) U.S. commercial...

We hypothesize that banks become better able to manage acquisitions, and investors become better able to value those acquisitions, as these parties ‘learn-by-observing’ information that spills-over from previous bank M&As. We find evidence consistent with these hypotheses for 216 M&As of...