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 paper deals with measuring total factor productivity (TFP) growth of financial institutions incorporating different types of deregulatory measures. TFP growth is decomposed into external, scale, and markup components. The external component is further dissected into deregulation and...

The U.S. banking industry has been characterized by intense merger activity in the absence of economies of scale and scope. We claim that the loosening of geographic constraints on U.S. banks is responsible for this consolidation process, irrespective of value-maximizing motives. We demonstrate...

We put forward a simple spatial competition model to study banks’ strategic responses to the Spanish asymmetric geographic deregulation. We find that once geographic deregulation process finishes, inter-regional mergers between the savings banks are optimal. We claim that the public good...

This paper investigates the relevance of non-traditional activities in the estimation of bank efficiency levels using a sample of 752 publicly quoted commercial banks from 87 countries around the world, allowing comparison of the impact of such activities under different levels of economic...

Frontier cost efficiency and technical change are examined for separate panels of Spanish commercial and savings banks over 1985-91, a period in which interest rates were totally deregulated and geographical restrictions were removed. Deregulation was supposed to provide an opportunity for the...

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...

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...