Sustainability and Efficiency of the European Banking Market after the Global Crisis: The Impact of Some Strategic Choices

Francesca Pampurini and Anna Grazia Quaranta
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Francesca Pampurini: Department of Economic and Social Sciences–Catholic University of Milan, 20123 Milano, Italy
Anna Grazia Quaranta: Department of Economics and Law–University of Macerata, 62100 Macerata, Italy

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 7, 1-16

Abstract: In the last few years, financial managers, supervisors and policy makers have been collectively engaged on the role of the banking and financial sector in relation to environmental and sustainability issues. The efficiency level that characterizes the production process of banks and financial intermediaries is strictly interconnected with sustainability so that, from a long term perspective, cost and profit efficiency reveals to be one of the most important premises for sustainability. This work aimed to analyze the level of efficiency achieved by European banking groups to verify if some key drivers of efficiency deriving from strategic choices outlined by literature on single banks (i.e., size, number of branches, cost income ratio and geographical location) are the same when considering banking groups. The study is focused on the period 2011–2016 that is characterized by, at least, two critical events that occurred after the sub-prime crisis. The level of efficiency of each banking group was measured with the Stochastic Frontier Approach and then the units were clustered into three homogeneous sets. Observing these clusters, the results show that the groups belonging to some specific countries appear to be more efficient with respect to others. Moreover, the banking groups characterized by many branches and a high level of cost income ratio exhibit a medium level of efficiency. Eventually, the biggest banking groups are the least efficient.

Keywords: X-efficiency; Stochastic Frontier Approach; cost efficiency; banking groups; multivariate analysis; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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