Earnings Quality of Commercial Banks in the Post- liberalized Era: A Multivariate Analysis

The banking sector reforms introduced in the 1990’s have changed the face of the banking sector in India. New private banks were started functioning in India with new technology after a long period of time and creates tougher competition between the existing players and the new generation banks. Profitability is one of the key indicator used to test the performance of a bank. This can be achieved only by increasing the income and better operational performance. In this paper, an attempt is done to measure and compare the earnings quality of the top eight banks six selected public sector banks and two from the new generation private sector banks, bank-wise and bank sector-wise by considering three core areas viz., operational performance, profitability and source of income. In this paper, MANCOVA technique is used to find out the difference between banks and bank sectors. It is found that HDFC Bank Ltd and SBT ranks first and second respectively in terms of overall earnings quality performance and the difference in the performance of new generation private sector banks and the public sector banks are highly relevant. In terms of operational performance, Canara Bank is the best bank and HDFC Bank Ltd is the best bank in terms of profitability and source of earnings.