D uring the early 1990s bank examiners were frequently accused of being too strict with banks in New England, thereby contributing to a credit crunch in the region.1 If supervisors of New England banks were being unusually strict, they may have been reacting to public complaints of lax supervision of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s. Such complaints were rife as New England banks’ loa...

Economic theory traditionally supports the viewpoint that government ownership is inefficient and that privatization invariably leads to efficiency improvements. However, there is often frequent opposition to privatization activity because it is difficult to examine and empirically validate the effects of privatization. This is the first study to examine the impact of the privatization of posta...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, in the framework of the strategic groups’ literature, it analyses changes in productivity and efficiency of Spanish private and savings banks over an eight-year period (1998–2006). Second, by adapting the decomposition of the Malmquist productivity indices suggested by Färe et al. (1994), it proposes similar components decomposing the Luenberger prod...

The aim of this study, through the estimation of a cost function, is to estimate the scale economies and scale and X-inefficiencies of commercial banks operating in Indonesia with a view to identifying hypothetical mergers that could deliver significant cost savings. Economies of scale are typically only found for the largest and smallest banks, with the industry’s estimated scale inefficiency ...

Banking and real estate have always had an uneasy relationship. It was not until early this century that national banks were even permitted to extend loans collateralized by real estate. To this day, national banks, bank holding companies, and many state-chartered banks are prohibited from owning real estate directly, except when obtained through foreclosure or if used for bank premises.~ In ad...

This paper identifies the effect of financing constraints on firms’ labor demand. We exploit exogenous funding shocks to German savings banks during the US mortgage crisis that are unrelated to local conditions. We find that firms with credit relationships with affected banks experienced a significant decline in employment and in labor compensation relative to firms whose credit relationships w...

Interest income is the most important source of revenue for most of the banks. The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of di erent interest rate scenarios on the banks' interest income. As we do not know the interest rate sensitivity of real banks, we construct for each bank a portfolio with a similar composition of its assets and liabilities, called 'tracking bank'. We evaluate the e ect...

the growing importance of the environmental and social policies in the spanish savings banksand the large differences between them, take us to delve into those factors that influence on the amounts spent on environment and welfare fund.in this line, we have analyzed all the spanish savings banks, over the period 2004-2008 and using the methodology of panel data, the effect that the composition ...

the growing importance of the environmental and social policies in the spanish savings banksand the large differences between them, take us to delve into those factors that influence on the amounts spent on environment and welfare fund.in this line, we have analyzed all the spanish savings banks, over the period 2004-2008 and using the methodology of panel data, the effect that the composition ...