This paper reviews the standard techniques of efficiency measurement, discusses some of the issues that arise in applying these standard techniques to central banks, and reviews some of the literature that has attempted to apply these techniques to central banking. The uniqueness of some of the...

Great strides have been made in the theory of bank technology in terms of explaining banks’ comparative advantage in producing informationally intensive assets and financial services and in diversifying or offsetting a variety of risks. Great strides have also been made in explaining sub-par...

Over the last decade, the legal and institutional frameworks governing central banks and financial market regulatory authorities throughout the world have undergone significant changes. This has created new interest in better understanding the roles played by organizational structures,...

Estimates of bank cost efficiency can be biased if bank heterogeneity is ignored. The author compares X-inefficiency measures derived from a model that constrains the cost frontier to be the same for all banks in the nation and a model that allows the cost functions and error terms to differ...

The authors investigate the effects of technological change, deregulation, and dynamic changes in competition on the performance of U.S. banks. The authors' most striking result is that during 1991-1997, cost productivity worsened while profit productivity improved substantially, particularly...

The authors argue for a shift in the focus of modeling production from the traditional assumptions of profit maximization and cost minimization to a more general assumption of managerial utility maximization that can incorporate risk incentives into the analysis of production and recover...

This paper discusses the research agenda on optimal bank productive efficiency and industrial structure. One goal of this agenda is to answer some fundamental questions in financial industry restructuring, such as what motivates bank managers to engage in mergers and acquisitions, and to...

We investigate the sources of recent changes in the performance of U.S. banks using concepts and techniques borrowed from the cross-section efficiency literature. Our most striking result is that during 1991-1997, cost productivity worsened while profit productivity improved substantially,...

The authors investigate efficiency and productivity growth of the U.S. banking industry over the latter part of the 1980s and first part of the 1990s using comprehensive data on U.S. commercial banks. Cost efficiency decreased slightly between the 1980s and 1990s, and large banks showed a...

The authors investigate the sources of recent changes in the performance of U.S. banks using concepts and techniques borrowed from the cross-section efficiency literature. Their most striking result is that during 1991-1997, cost productivity worsened while profit productivity improved...