In the last two decades, the European Union has undergone a major reduction in banking regulation. This paper investigates whether this deregulatory process was associated with increasing similarity, or convergence, of banking industries across the European Union. It reports that the...

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...

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...

This article investigates the effect of alternative ownership structures, stock versus mutual, on the cost of production of Spanish depository institutions. By introducing a stochastic frontier analysis in estimating the best-practiced expense-preference behaviour, the empirical approach adjusts...

Seventy years after the Great Depression, economists still debate the causes of this economic catastrophe. Two leading explanations are distinguished by whether or not the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies are perceived as being chiefly responsible for propagating and magnifying the initial...

In this paper we extend the efficiency cross-country comparisons to ten European countries in order to know how different or similar current banking performances are. We start with two types of comparisons. First of all, we evaluate the average technical efficiency of each country by means of a...