Bank Employment in the World's Largest Banks: An Update: Note
复制了1971年和1970年的两项研究，发现1967-79年间全球最大银行的劳动生产率有显著提升，且小银行提升幅度更大，挑战了银行业生产率难以提高的传统观点。
In this paper we replicate two studies published in this journal twelve and thirteen years ago (Short 1971 and Kaufman 1970). The results indicate that there may indeed have been substantial gains in labor productivity among the world's largest banks over the period 1967-79. Moreover, the gains were greater for the smaller banks in our sample than for the larger ones. Because banking has traditionally been regarded as highly labor-intensive industry, the general assumption has been that productivity gains in banking would be hard to achieve, and even harder to identify. Baumol and Oates (1972) ascribed the source of rising costs or a cost disease in service industries to the lagging technical progress there vis-a-vis other industries in the economy. Several attempts have been made to investigate this thesis with respect to banking, with mixed results. Kinsella (1973) found that the growth in labor productivity in banking in Ireland during the 1960-71 period confirmed the Baumol-Oates (1972) hypothesis. How-