This paper was presented at the conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century" as part of session 2, "Credit risk modeling." The conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 26-27, 1998, was designed to encourage a...

Most of the early studies of bank efficiency focused on scale and product mix efficiency, or how close banks are to producing at the scale or product mix that minimizes costs per unit of output. Despite these past efforts, something rather important is missing from most of the analysis according...