Enjoying the Quiet Life under Deregulation? Evidence from Adjusted Lerner Indices for U.S. Banks
通过调整勒纳指数来检验“安逸生活假说”，发现美国银行在成本效率上不成立，但在利润效率上存在安逸生活现象。
The quiet life hypothesis posits that firms with market power incur inefficiencies rather than reap monopolistic rents. We propose a simple adjustment to Lerner indices to account for the possibility of forgone rents to test this hypothesis. For a large sample of U.S. commercial banks, we find that adjusted Lerner indices are significantly larger than conventional Lerner indices and trending upward over time. Instrumental variable regressions reject the quiet life hypothesis for cost inefficiencies. However, Lerner indices adjusted for profit inefficiencies reveal a quiet life among U.S. banks. © 2012 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.