The efficiency and the conduct of European banks: Developments after 1992
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We assess the efficiency of the European banking sector in the 5‐year period following the implementation of the Second Banking Directive of the European Union (EU). We first determine the degree of cost efficiency of EU banks in 1993–1997. After that, we explore to what extent efficient European banks are managed differently than their inefficient peers. Our datasets comprise 5 years of observations on 1347 savings and 873 commercial banks. We use the new recursive thick frontier approach (RTFA) method to establish our results. We find that structural factors, such as technological progress or increased bank competition, have lowered the cost base of banks by about 5% annually during the sample period. Managerial inability to control costs (X‐inefficiency) is with 17–25% the main source of bank inefficiency in the EU. Managerial efficiency varies a great deal within Europe, and there seems to be no tendency towards convergence. We find that small savings banks can exploit economies of scale. The EU savings bank sector would cut costs by about 3% if small savings banks merged.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".