A widely publicized series of mergers has characterized the banking industry in recent years. Shareholder returns from these mergers have often been disappointing. This study finds delays in implementing potential operating savings and realizing benefits of scale economies may be one reason bank mergers have disappointing returns. We analyze a 200 branch network formed in a merger of four banks...

B anking industry performance and failure rates since the mid-1980s have followed a pattern that is tied closely to regional economic conditions. The pattern begins with increases in bank loan concentrations in areas related to a region's growth, followed by deterioration in asset quality, earnings, and capital when regional recessions appear. Moreover, rapid growth in bank assets often accompa...

Community banking initiatives are defined in this paper as membership based decentralised and self-help financial institutions. Under this broad definition we discuss the informal variants of community banks, the rotating savings and credit association (or in South Africa better known as the stokvel), the more formalised village banks spreading throughout the country and the very formalised (de...

Technical advances in retail banking have had profound repercussions for the competitiveness of individual firms and for the sector as a whole. This work sets out 2 objectives: first, it attempts to analyse the role of technology with respect to both organizational change and the products and services offered by the savings banks; and second, to investigate the reciprocal influence of technolog...

Retail banks usually apply simple linear regression models for describing the dynamics of the deposit rates of non-maturing accounts (NMA) like savings deposits. Thus, typical patterns like asymmetry or rigidity that banks follow when adjusting their deposit rates are ignored. This is insofar surprising, as the asymmetric deposit rate adjustment affects the pricing of embedded options for NMA. ...

Microfluidic technologies promise unprecedented savings in cost and time through the integration of complex chemical and biological assays on a microfabricated chip. Recent advances are making elements of this vision a reality, facilitating the first large-scale integration of microfluidic plumbing with biological assays. The power of miniaturization lies not only in achieving an economy of sca...

This paper uses variation in policies and institutional characteristics to evaluate the impacts of village-level microfinance institutions in rural Thailand. To identify impacts, we use policies related to the successful/unsuccessful provision of services as exogenous variation in effective financial intermediation. We find that institutions, particularly those with good policies, can promote a...

This paper uses variation in policies and institutional characteristics to evaluate the impacts of village-level microfinance institutions in rural Thailand. To identify impacts, we use policies related to the successful/unsuccessful provision of services as exogenous variation in effective financial intermediation. We find that institutions, particularly those with good policies, can promote a...