Economies of Scale and Scope in Canadian Branch Banking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study attempts to examine the nature of the production process of branch banking using detailed output and cost data obtained for a sample of 563 branches across Canada of a major Canadian bank. The branches considered span both urban and rural areas as well as retail and commercial banking operations. Transcendental logarithmic cost functions are estimated in order to shed light on two questions. First, to what extent are scale and scope economies prevalent for branch banking? Second, does the separation of retail from commerical banking, which has been facilitated through the growth of remote access terminals, automated cash dispensers, and electronic tellers lead to improved efficiency through more appropriate choices of branch size? The evidence from the sample and the estimation points to the following conclusions. First, scale economies are apparent in the $50 million to $100 million range of output; that many branches in Canada tend to operate at output levels within as well as below this rang...
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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 | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".