Financial sector liberalization,bank privatization,and efficiency: Evidence from Pakistan

The Pakistani banking system has been transformed over the past 15 years through liberalization, the entry of private banks, the privatization of public-sector banks, and the tightening of prudential regulations. The effects of these changes on bank productivity and relative efficiency are investigated using various techniques. Bank productivity in terms of profits has increased, and new entrants have been efficient, but the dispersion of efficiency remains wide. The privatized banks improved their profit efficiency in the period immediately following their privatization, but in the subsequent years only one significantly improved its efficiency, whereas the other did not differentiate itself in terms of efficiency from the remaining state-owned banks. The new private domestic banks generally proved to be among the most efficient, and sometimes out-performed the foreign banks.     

Pricing,operating efficiency,and profitability among large commercial banks

This study uses statistical cost accounting techniques to examine the relationship between bank profitability and two dimensions of operating performance — pricing and operating efficiency. The traditional statistical cost accounting model, which relates a firm's income to its asset and liability mix, is expanded to account for differences in market structure, regional demand and supply conditions, and macroeconomics factors. The study focuses on large (above $500 million in domestic deposits) banks, comparing a sample of relatively profitable banks against a matched group of much less profitable banks over the period 1970–1977. After allowing for regional supply and demand factors, the high and low-profit banks are estimated to earn equal market rates of return on individual assets and liabilities. There is virtually no evidence that differential prices are an important discriminator between the two bank groups. Some evidence is found that the high-earnings banks experience lower operating costs on some liabilities, but the opposite is true with respect to selected asset items. After taxes are taken into account, however, any such cost differentials virtually disappear. Overall, there is no compelling evidence that high-profit banks are characterized by greater operating efficiency than their low-earnings counterparts. This finding is consistent with the view that over time, and especially among relatively large banks, information flows and competitive pressures act to reduce operating efficiency differences that may appear in the short run.     

Bank ownership,privatization, and performance: Evidence from a transition country

This paper combines the static effect of ownership and the dynamic effect of privatization on bank performance in China over 1995–2010, reporting a significantly higher performance by private intermediaries – joint stock commercial banks and city commercial banks – relative to state-owned commercial banks. However, publicly traded banks, subject to multiple monitoring and vetting in capital markets, perform better regardless of ownership status. The privatization of banks has improved performance with respect to revenue inflow and efficiency gains in the short- or long-run (initial public offerings). The positive long-run effect is more relevant and significant for banking institutions with minority foreign ownership. Moreover, this paper innovatively estimates interest income efficiency and non-interest income efficiency at the same time. The results suggest that Chinese banks are much more efficient in generating interest income than raising non-interest revenue, although the latter aspect has improved significantly during the sample period.     

Productivity and efficiency analysis of Shinkin banks: Evidence from bootstrap and Bayesian approaches

This paper analyzes the productivity and efficiency of Shinkin banks and the various prefectures in Japan, over the period from 2000 to 2006. We obtain estimates of efficiency growth and productivity growth, using the bootstrapped Malmquist index, and estimates of efficiency using the Bayesian distance frontier approach. We confirm that the efficiency growth and productivity growth of Shinkin banks did not improve significantly over the period of this study. In addition, we show that the efficiency of Shinkin banks is homogenous, with little variation across the banks analyzed. Methodologically, we also prove that a failure to impose theoretical regularity on the distance function could lead to false conclusions about the average efficiency or efficiency ranking of Shinkin banks. The study also includes an analysis of the correlates of productivity and efficiency growth, and provides efficiency and productivity estimates of the prefectures in which the banks are located.     

Competition from Large, Multimarket Firms and the Performance of Small, Single-Market Firms: Evidence from the Banking Industry

We offer and test two competing hypotheses for the consolidation trend in banking using U.S. banking industry data over the period 1982–2000. Under the efficiency hypothesis , technological progress improved the performance of large, multimarket firms relative to small, single-market firms, whereas under the hubris hypothesis , consolidation was largely driven by corporate hubris. Our results are consistent with an empirical dominance of the efficiency hypothesis over the hubris hypothesis—on net, technological progress allowed large, multimarket banks to compete more effectively against small, single-market banks in the 1990s than in the 1980s. We also isolate the extent to which technological progress occurred through scale versus geographic effects and how they affected the performance of small, single-market banks through revenues versus costs. The results may shed light as well on some of the research and policy issues related to community banking.     

How loan portfolio diversification affects risk, efficiency and capitalization: A managerial behavior model for Austrian banks

The aim of this paper is to analyze how diversification of banks across size and industry affects risk, cost and profit efficiency, and bank capitalization for large Austrian commercial banks over the years 1997–2003. Employing a unique dataset, provided by the Austrian Central Bank, we test for several different types of managerial hypotheses, formalized according to a modified version of the Berger and DeYoung model [Berger, A.N., DeYoung, R., 1997. Problem loans and cost efficiency in commercial banks. Journal of Banking and Finance 21, 849–870]. We find that, although diversification negatively affects cost efficiency, it increases profit efficiency and reduces banks’ realized risk. Finally, diversification seems to have a positive impact on banks’ capitalization.     

A nonparametric approach to measurement of efficiency and technological change: The case of large U.S. commercial banks

The purpose of this paper is to derive the efficiency measures and the rate of technological change for a sample of large U.S. commercial banks by employing a nonparametric technique. This technique is used to construct a multiproduct production frontier relative to which the efficiency measures of the banks in the sample are calculated and the displacement of which over time provides a measure of the rate of technological change. The empirical results indicate that the relevant frontier shifted inward between 1980 and 1985 reflecting a high pace of technological advancement achieved by the banks in the sample. The pace varied significantly across the banks with some banks even regressing over time.     

Efficiency in the Vietnamese banking system: A DEA double bootstrap approach

This study analyses bank efficiency in Vietnam from 1999 to 2009. We use a unique data sample that allows us to capture the development of the Vietnamese banking sector over the last decade. We apply an advanced methodological approach introduced by Simar and Wilson (2007) to examine bank efficiency in Vietnam. An integral part of the analysis is to explore the determinants of bank efficiency. The results indicate that large and very large banks are more efficient than small and medium sized banks with small banks having the lowest efficiency scores in the system. Non-state owned commercial banks are more efficient than state owned commercial banks assuming overall efficiency. We also argue that banks with large branch networks and those that have been in existence for a long time are less efficient than other banks.     

Bank performance,efficiency and ownership in transition countries

Using data from 1996 to 2000, we investigate the effects of ownership, especially by a strategic foreign owner, on bank efficiency for eleven transition countries in an unbalanced panel consisting of 225 banks and 856 observations. Applying stochastic frontier estimation procedures, we compute profit and cost efficiency taking account of both time and country effects directly. In second-stage regressions, we use the efficiency measures along with return on assets to investigate the influence of ownership type. With respect to the impact of ownership, we conclude that privatization by itself is not sufficient to increase bank efficiency as government-owned banks are not appreciably less efficient than domestic private banks. We find that foreign-owned banks are more cost-efficient than other banks and that they also provide better service, in particular if they have a strategic foreign owner. The remaining government-owned banks are less efficient in providing services, which is consistent with the hypothesis that the better banks were privatized first in transition countries.     

Estimating the technical and scale efficiency of Greek commercial banks: The impact of credit risk, off-balance sheet activities, and international operations

This paper uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) to investigate the efficiency of the Greek commercial banking industry over the period 2000–2004. Our results indicate that the inclusion of loan loss provisions as an input increases the efficiency scores, but off-balance sheet items do not have a significant impact. The differences between the efficiency scores obtained through the profit-oriented and the intermediation approaches are in general small. Banks that have expanded their operations abroad appear to be more technical efficient than those operating only at a national level. Higher capitalization, loan activity, and market power increase the efficiency of banks. The number of branches has a positive and significant impact on efficiency, but the number of ATMs does not. The results are mixed with respect to variables indicating whether the banks are operating abroad through subsidiaries or branches.     

Trademarking status and economic efficiency among commercial banks: Some evidence for the UK

As competition in the banking sector has intensified over the last two decades, commercial banks have started to use trademarks to differentiate their products and services from those offered by their competitors. Less clear are the implications of the trademarking activities on the commercial banks’ performance. In this paper, we compare the cost and profit efficiency of trademarking and non-trademarking banks in the UK, over the period 2001–2013 using stochastic frontier methods. We use Propensity Score Matching techniques to identify a sample of non-trademarking banks which share the same characteristics as the trademarking banks to ensure that variations in the efficiency between the commercial banks in our sample can be attributed to their trademarking status only. We then explicitly test the hypothesis that trademarking and non-trademarking banks share the same cost and profit frontiers. We cannot reject the hypothesis of a common cost and profit frontier. We also find that trademarking banks tend to be more profit efficient than non-trademarking banks while there is no significant difference between the cost efficiency scores of trademarking and non-trademarking banks.     

改进的效率测算模型、影子银行与中国商业银行效率

商业银行及其效率的高低是金融供给侧结构性改革的关键环节,而可以压缩的“坏”投入和影子银行对商业银行效率产生重要影响。本文首次建立理论模型并分析影子银行影响商业银行效率的路径;方法上,同时区分投入和产出的“好”或“坏”,拓展只区分产出的“好”或“坏”的效率测算模型;实证上,首次测算并分析“坏”投入、影子银行业务对商业银行利润、风险和效率的影响。结果表明:理论上,影子银行会同时增加风险承担和利润,但无法确定经风险调整后的利润增加能否提升效率;只区分产出的模型高估了效率,尤其是显著高估四大行和股份制商业银行第一阶段的效率,大型商业银行依靠网点的扩张不利于效率的提升;影子银行业务提升了四大国有银行尤其是股份制银行的效率,但对中小型商业银行效率影响较小。总的来看,压缩“坏”投入和规范影子银行是增加有效金融供给、优化金融供给结构和提升银行效率的重要途径。     

An empirical study of bank efficiency in China after WTO accession

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 2001. The improvement of bank efficiency is most prominent for the largest banks with substantial state ownership. We also find that majority state-owned banks are least efficient; well capitalized banks are less efficient; bank efficiency decreases with bank size at the lower end, but banks gain efficiency and realize economies of scale when bank size grows large enough; more fee-generating business reduces efficiency; better management improves efficiency.     

Technical Efficiency Measurement Incorporating Risk Preferences: An Empirical Analysis of Chinese Commercial Banks

By adjusting direction vectors, we are able to measure technical efficiency incorporating risk preference of individual banks using non-parametric and parametric approaches. Furthermore, we explore categories of commercial banks by comparing their risk preferences to the risk preference that optimizes technical efficiency. Three results emerged. First, technical efficiency scores of joint stock and city commercial banks surpassed those of state-owned commercial banks under the optimal risk preference, and technical efficiency generally improved over time. Second, the preference for risk balance was optimal for achieving technical efficiency. Third, a larger proportion of state-owned and joint stock commercial banks fall into the preference for risk neutral category than city commercial banks.     

Banking efficiency and stock market performance: an analysis of listed Indonesian banks

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the monthly profit-based technical efficiency and productivity of listed Indonesian banks and their market performance. We examined the banks through the prism of two modelling techniques, efficiency and super-efficiency, over the period January 2003 to end-July 2007. Within this research strategy we employed Tone??s (2001) non-parametric, Slacks-Based Model (SBM) and Tone??s (2002) super-efficiency SBM to estimate the bank efficiencies. They were then combined with recent bootstrapping techniques, namely the non-parametric truncated regression analysis suggested by Simar and Wilson (2007), to identify the determinants of the efficiency scores. With respect to the latter, in the case of the SBM efficiency scores, the Simar and Wilson methodology was adapted to two truncations, whereas in the super-efficiency framework the original technique was utilised. The first part of the analysis reveals that listed banks?? average efficiencies varied widely over the sample period, from a low of 34% to a high of 97%, with only one bank having a score in excess of unity under the super-efficiency framework. The two most efficient banks were domestically owned. With respect to the truncated regression analysis, we found that the banks?? efficiency scores were positively correlated with share prices and return on equity in all models, and with the log of total assets in the super-efficiency analysis. Moreover, it was found that the JCI index of the Indonesian Stock Exchange is positively related to bank efficiency in all models. Another interesting finding is that the coefficient for the share of foreign ownership is negative and statistically significant in the super-efficiency modelling. This suggests that Indonesian banks with foreign ownership tend to be less efficient than their domestic counterparts. Finally, Malmquist productivity results suggest that, over the study??s horizon, the sample banks displayed volatile productivity patterns in their profit-generating operations.     

Is cloud computing the digital solution to the future of banking?

This study investigates the impact of banks’ strategic move to cloud computing on bank performance and risk-taking. Based on a novel index of banks’ exposure to cloud computing, we find that banks’ adoption of cloud computing is associated with lower cost efficiency, higher profit efficiency, and greater operational risk using data on Chinese banks over the period 2008–2019. We also find that cloud computing interacts with other newly emerging technologies, leading to synergy gains in cost efficiency and operational risk control but with a substitutive effect on profit efficiency from blockchain. The findings are of timely policy importance and practical relevance for regulators, policy-makers, and bank managers.     

Ownership structure,risk and performance in the European banking industry

We compare the performance and risk of a sample of 181 large banks from 15 European countries over the 1999–2004 period and evaluate the impact of alternative ownership models, together with the degree of ownership concentration, on their profitability, cost efficiency and risk. Three main results emerge. First, after controlling for bank characteristics, country and time effects, mutual banks and government-owned banks exhibit a lower profitability than privately owned banks, in spite of their lower costs. Second, public sector banks have poorer loan quality and higher insolvency risk than other types of banks while mutual banks have better loan quality and lower asset risk than both private and public sector banks. Finally, while ownership concentration does not significantly affect a bank’s profitability, a higher ownership concentration is associated with better loan quality, lower asset risk and lower insolvency risk. These differences, along with differences in asset composition and funding mix, indicate a different financial intermediation model for the different ownership forms.     

Market concentration and bank competition in emerging asian countries over pre and post the 2008 global financial crisis

This paper examines the relationships between market concentration, bank competition, and efficiency in banking across six emerging Asian countries namely Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam over the period 2005 to 2012. The countries selected for this study operate commercial banking activities with a comparatively large number of both publicly listed and private commercial banks providing a broad range of commercial banking services. For example, banks in Bangladesh, India and Vietnam used to be predominantly state-owned. But over the last few decades, governments have been issuing licenses to private owners. The methodological approach taken by our study provides an important and original contribution to the extant literature by testing various hypothesis that investigate the relationship between competition and efficiency across banks from a select group of Asian countries. We find that market concentration has a positive effect whereas competition has a negative effect on the efficiency of banks operating in these countries. This finding conveys a critically important message to the regulators of banks in these countries: there is a trade-off between quantity and quality. Our analyses also reveal that the effect of bank size on efficiency is positive whereas the effect of liquidity risk on efficiency is negative. This again supports the conventional wisdom that large banks are in a position to provide cost efficient services because they have the ability to attain economies of scale and scopes. Here again, the regulators have very important roles to play: while they have to put in place effective mechanism preventing big banks from being an oligarchy; at the same time, they should make sure that banks get liquidity support as funding pressure builds up.     

商业银行绩效、效率与市场结构——基于中国1994～2005年的面板数据

本文应用随机边界方法(SFA)测度了中国16家全国性商业银行的X效率和规模效率,并在此基础上针对其经营绩效与市场结构间关系的几种经验假说进行了检验。统计结果显示,样本期内各商业银行的效率情况总体上均不断改善,其中股份制银行的X效率水平普遍高于国有银行,但在减速递增的过程中差距在不断缩小;另一方面,国有银行在规模经济上具有显著优势,并且2002年以来优势还在进一步扩大;最后,关于银行绩效与市场结构关系的四个主要经验假说在中国银行业市场均不适用,中国商业银行部门的成本控制优势在迅速扩大业务规模的过程中并未有效地转化为盈利能力的提高。     

Spanish credit institutions: do efficiency and solvency support the first decisions on bank restructuring from a financial point of view 2008-2012?

The restructuring processes of the Spanish financial entities over the last years has led us to analyze financially how efficiency and solvency of banks and savings banks explain the decisions of incorporation and control of these entities. We analyze 51 Spanish financial entities for the period 2008-2012. The results show higher solvency and efficiency of banks over savings banks. On the other hand, after the first integrations it is observed that it is still early for these ratios to improve on the results obtained by the entities before the integrations. However, from the financial point of view, these integrations do explain how correct the start-up and intensification of the restructuring processes were. There are some exceptions to the global criteria, which are explained by the size, strength and structure of the business and the closeness of its financial management scope to the area and business structure of the bigger banking groups.