Technical, Scale, and Allocative Efficiencies in U.S. Banking: An Empirical Investigation

A nonparametric frontier approach is used to calculate the overall, technical, pure technical, allocative, and scale efficiencies for a sample of 322 independent banks. The sample was drawn from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation tapes on the Reports of Condition and Reports of Income (Call Reports) for the year 1986. The results indicated a low level of overall efficiency. The main source of inefficiency was technical in nature, rather than allocative. Separate efficiency frontiers were constructed to test the effect of branching. However, the distributions of efficiency measures for branching and non-branching banks were not found to be different.