Bank Capitalization and Cost: Evidence of Scale Economies in Risk Management and Signaling
修正了标准成本模型，将金融资本作为银行应对破产风险的工具和向外部传递风险信号的机制，发现银行存在显著的规模经济且管理者是风险厌恶的。
We amend the standard cost model to account for the role of financial capital in banking. The cost function is conditioned on the level of capital, but we model the demand for financial capital so that it can serve as a cushion against insolvency for potentially risk-averse managers and as a signal of risk for less informed outsiders. Scale economies are then computed without assuming that the bank chooses a level of capitalization that minimizes cost. We find evidence of substantial scale economies and that bank managers are risk averse and use the level of financial capital to signal the level of risk. © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology