1、本科毕业论文外文翻译 外文题目： Profit efficiency sources and differences among small and Large U.S commercial banks 出 处： Journal of economic and finance (2005):289-299 作 者： Aigbe Akhigbe and James McNulty 原 文： Introduction Scale economies in banking have long been of interest to financial economists, and this int
2、erest has been heightened in recent years by two developments. The first is increased concern about the survivability of small community banks in an era of bank consolidation. This theme was the subject of a March 2003 conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and formed the basis for a spec
3、ial March 2004 issue of the Journal of Financial Services Research. The second development is recent academic research suggesting that small banks may have both an information advantage over large banks, as in Nakamura (1993), Mester, Nakamura, and Renault (2001), and Carter and McNulty (2004), and
4、an incentive to use this information advantage in the lending process. Berger et al. (2002) provide evidence on the second point. They suggest that small banks may have a comparative advantage in developing and using the “soft” information often associated with small business lending. PROFEFF is an
5、econometric financial performance measure that indicates how actual financial performance compares to a theoretical best-practice frontier. Considering differences in, and sources of, profit efficiency (PROFEFF) by bank size groups can help shed light on the issue of which banks use their capital mo
6、re efficiently (provided profits are normalized by equity, which is the approach we take in this paper). Relevant Literature and Estimation Issues Most studies done in the 1980s and early 1990s suggest that scale economies are slight or nonexistent beyond asset sizes of $50 to $100 million. Some ear
7、ly examples are Benston, Hanweck, and Humphrey (1982), Gilligan, Smirlock, and Marshall (1984), Clark (1984), Nelson (1985), and Berger, Hanweck, and Humphrey (1987). Using 1984 data, Berger and Humphrey (1991) find that economies of scale at the firm level are exhausted beyond $200 million in asset
8、 size. Since this influential study, which found that gains from reducing cost inefficiencies dominate gains from realizing scale economies, the focus of most studies has shifted to inefficiencies and hence away from optimum size. However, using cost efficiency, Berger and Mester (1997) conclude tha
9、t scale economies are exhausted well before $10 billion in asset size. Since these studies estimate cost economies, they cannot directly address the possibility that revenues may be more than proportionately higher for larger banks. However, another related trend in this literature has been increase
10、d recognition that profit efficiency is a more appropriate technique to use in evaluating bank performance than cost efficiency since PROFEFF incorporates both revenues and costs. Recent profit efficiency studies include Altunbas, Evans, and Molyneux (2001), Akhigbe and McNulty (2003), Berger and Me
11、ster (1997, 2001), DeYoung and Hasan (1998), and DeYoung and Nolle (1996), among others. Other recent studies of U.S. banking efficiency include Barr, Kilgo, Siems, and Stiroh (2000), Zimmel (2002), Berger and DeYoung (2001), and Wheelock and Walker (1999, 2000). The keynote paper at the above-menti
12、oned conference, by DeYoung, Hunter, and Udell (2004), argues that small banks and large banks have a different focus and a different business modelpersonalized service and customized financial services (e.g., small business loans) in the case of small banks and efficient distribution of relatively
13、uniform types of financial services (e.g., credit cards and home equity loans) in the case of large banks. The business model of the small bank requires relatively high cost, while larger banks can keep cost low. Under this line of reasoning, both types of banks should have a role to play in the fut
14、ure financial services marketplace. Nonetheless, differences in PROFEFF are important because ultimately small and large banks compete for capital. For example, the decision of a smaller bank to join or not to join a large banking organization through a merger is ultimately a subjective decision abo
15、ut how its capital can be best employed. Given these considerations, two important questions raised by Berger and Mester (1997) must be considered before we proceed. The first is the appropriate variableassets or equityto use in normalizing profits in computing the PROFEFF measure. The second is the
16、 use of one frontier or several frontiers in comparing banks of different sizes. Because PROFEFF, when normalized by equity, measures how well a bank utilizes its financial capital, we choose to use this measure. Some earlier studies comparing large and small banks, such as Akhigbe and McNulty (2003
17、), use assets and find small banks have higher PROFEFF. Use of equity can be expected to produce the opposite result since large banks use more leverage than small banks. In other words, the PROFEFF measure that we use is closer to return on equity, which should show greater PROFEFF for large banks.
18、 Normalizing by assets is likely to produce the opposite result. Since we want to consider the sources of the differences in PROFEFF, we use three different frontiers for small, medium, and large banks. This is consistent with the assumption that their focus, and their basic business model, is diffe
19、rent. This procedure allows the PROFEFF measures to have maximum flexibilitysmall bank PROFEFF and its frontier are not constrained or affected in any way by the activities and balance-sheet structure of large banks, and vice versa. Thus, when we look at the determinants of PROFEFF for the three gro
20、ups, if they are different, this will reflect real differences, and if they are the same, it will not be because the same frontier was imposed on all banks. We recognize the alternative argument that, in comparing the performance of different banks, one normally wants to use the same test, not two o
21、r three different tests.(We made this argument ourselves in an earlier paper.) Profit Efficiency Trends for Various Bank Size Groups PROFEFF has declined sharply in recent years for small banks, from 0.778 in 1995 to 0.702 in 2001. We consider the hypothesis that this decline may reflect an increasing number of de novo banks in the small bank category. FDIC data indicate that between 1992 and 1994 only 74 new banks per year were chartered, which no
