Search Results
Journal Article
Trends in the efficiency of Federal Reserve check processing operations
The Monetary Control Act of 1980 requires the Federal Reserve to charge customers for financial services, with the intent of improving the efficiency with which Fed offices deliver those services. Prior studies found little improvement in the efficiency of Fed check processing operations after pricing was implemented in 1982. This article examines the efficiency of Fed check operations using a longer sample period (1980:Q1?2003:Q3) than previous studies and new methods for estimating efficiency. The authors find that the median office became somewhat less efficient when pricing was ...
Journal Article
Turbulent Years for U.S. Banks: 2000-20
The first 20 years of the twenty-first century have presented U.S. banks with three recessions, long periods of very low interest rates, and increased regulation. The number of commercial banks operating in the United States declined by 51 percent during this period. This article examines the performance of U.S. commercial banks from 2000 through 2020. An overall picture is provided by examining the evolution of assets, deposits, loans, and other financial characteristics over the period. In addition, new estimates of technical inefficiency are provided, offering additional insight into ...
Working Paper
Robust nonparametric estimation of efficiency and technical change in U.S. commercial banking
This paper examines the performance of the U.S. commercial banking industry over 1984-2002. Rather than measuring performance relative to the unknown (and difficult-to-estimate) boundary of the production set, performance for a given bank is measured relative to expected maximum output among m banks using no more of each input than the given bank. This approach permits fully non-parametric estimation with vn-consistency avoiding the usual curse of dimensionality that plagues traditional non-parametric efficiency estimators. The resulting estimates are robust with respect to outliers and noise ...
Working Paper
Are U.S. banks too large?
The number of commercial banks in the United States has fallen by more than 50 percent since 1984. This consolidation of the U.S. banking industry and the accompanying large increase in average (and median) bank size have prompted concerns about the effects of consolidation and increasing bank size on market competition and on the number of banks that regulators deem ?too big to fail.? Agency problems and perverse incentives created by government policies are often cited as reasons why many banks of pursued acquisitions and growth, though bankers often point to economies of scale. This paper ...
Working Paper
Explaining bank failures: deposit insurance, regulation, and efficiency
This paper uses micro-level historical data to examine the causes of bank failure. For state charactered Kansas banks during 19 10-28, time-to-failure is explicitly modeled using a proportional hazards framework. In addition to standard financial ratios, this study includes membership in the voluntary state deposit insurance system and measures of technical efficiency to explain bank failure. The results indicate that deposit insurance system membership increased theprobability of failure and banks which were technically inefficient were more likely to fail than technically efficient banks.
Working Paper
New evidence on the Fed's productivity in providing payments services
As the dominant provider of payments services, the efficiency with which the Federal Reserve provides such services in an important public policy issue. This paper examines the productivity of Federal Reserve check-processing offices during 1980-1999 using non-parametric estimation methods and newly developed methods for non-parametric inference and hypothesis testing. The results support prior studies that found little initial improvement in the Fed's efficiency with the imposition of pricing for Federal Reserve services in 1982. However, we find that median productivity improved ...
Working Paper
Robust, dynamic nonparametric benchmarking: the evolution of cost-productivity and efficiency among U.S. credit unions
This paper develops a new methodology for estimating cost-productivity and efficiency change that benchmarks the performance of individual firms against an estimated a-quantile. We adapt the estimators of Daouia and Simar (2007) and Wheelock and Wilson (2008a) to the estimation of cost efficiency where input prices and some outputs are fixed. Theoretical results demonstrate that our new estimator retains the root-n convergence, asymptotic normality, and other desirable properties of the original estimators. We show how the estimator can be used to construct a cost analog of the widely-used ...
Working Paper
Are credit unions too small?
Since 1985, the share of U.S. depository institution assets held by credit unions has nearly doubled, and the average (inflation-adjusted) size of credit unions has increased over 600 percent. We use a non-parametric local-linear estimator to estimate a cost relationship for credit unions and derive estimates of ray-scale and expansion-path scale economies. We employ a dimension-reduction technique to reduce estimation error, and bootstrap methods for inference. We find substantial evidence of increasing returns to scale across the range of sizes observed among credit unions, suggesting that ...