Do Large Banks Have Lower Costs? New Estimates of Returns to Scale for U.S. Banks
用非参数方法估计美国银行规模经济，发现直到2006年多数银行仍存在规模报酬递增，这可能是银行规模增长的原因。
This paper presents new, fully nonparametric estimates of ray‐scale and expansion‐path scale economies for U.S. banks based on a model of bank costs. Unlike prior studies that use models with restrictive parametric assumptions or limited samples, our methodology uses local polynomial estimators and data on all U.S. banks over the period 1984–2006. Our estimates indicate that as recently as 2006, most U.S. banks faced increasing returns to scale, suggesting that scale economies are a plausible (but not necessarily only) reason for the growth in average bank size and that the tendency toward increasing scale is likely to continue unless checked by government intervention.