Cost efficiency of banks in 20 former socialist emerging economies is analyzed using a novel methodology - a latent class stochastic efficiency frontier model - that explicitly accounts for unobserved differences in technological regimes due to the heterogeneity of economic environments in which...

This paper examines the impact of regulatory reform on the performance of Spanish savings banks. To this end it uses panel data for the period 1986-1995 and a flexible variable profit function that incorporates time-varying technical efficiency. The focus is whether increased competition brought...