This paper documents the technical efficiency of Chinese banks over 1999–2010. With stochastic frontier analysis, we find that Chinese banks are about 18% more efficient in generating lending assets than profits. We also observe an upward trend of bank efficiency after China's entry to WTO in...

Purpose – As part of the banking reform, major commercial banks in China went through initial public offerings (IPOs) in the past two decades. Has this change in the ownership structure led to improvement in their performance? With a comprehensive data set of Chinese banks over 1999-2010, the...