Impact of Specialization, Ownership Structure, and Size on Cost and Profit Efficiency of US Commercial and Savings Banks

Using an unbalanced panel dataset of 5,265 observations from 454 US banks including 394 commercial and 60 savings banks, and Battese and Coelli (1995) Stochastic Frontier model, this study has determined the recent level of cost and profit efficiency estimates of these banks and analysed the impact of specialization, ownership structure, and size on the cost and profit efficiency. The results reveal that the cost efficiency of US commercial and savings banks is statistically higher than the profit efficiency with a score of 92.1% and 63.59% respectively; the global financial crisis did not affect cost efficiency much, but it had a shattering effect on the profit efficiency; the savings banks are more cost efficient than the commercial banks and commercial banks are more profit efficient than savings banks; there is no significant differences between the cost and profit efficiencies of privately and publicly owned banks; foreign banks are less cost and profit efficient compare to their domestic counterparts; and finally, the small banks enjoy higher cost and profit efficiency than their large, medium, and very large counterparts. The other determinants of cost and profit efficiency were found to be expectedly affecting the cost and profit efficiency of US banks. JEL classification numbers: C33, C67, D22, D24, G01, G21, G32. Keywords: Cost Efficiency, Profit Efficiency, US Commercial and Savings Banks, Bank Specialization, Ownership Structure, Bank Size.