Published in:Banque centrale du Luxembourg Working Paper ; No. 27
Extent:
1 Online-Ressource (28 p)
Language:
Not determined
DOI:
10.2139/ssrn.966293
Identifier:
Origination:
Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments June 6, 2007 erstellt
Description:
The measurement of banking output (and therefore productivity) has long been controversial. This article applies the user cost approach in Fixler and Zieschang (1999) to quarterly reporting data from Luxembourg's banking sector. This requires associating the flows in the profit-and-loss account to different assets and liabilities in the balance sheet. The user cost of each asset/liability is then calculated as the difference between the rate at which it generates revenues/costs and a quot;reference ratequot; representing the opportunity cost of funds. A negative user cost then identifies an asset or liability as an output and a positive user cost identifies it as an input in the production process. In theory, this datadriven approach is capable of combining elements of both the two traditional approaches to measuring banking output (the production and intermediation approaches) since these classify inputs and outputs on an a priori basis. In practice, our results suggest that neither of these conventional approaches is wholly consistent with the data for Luxembourg. We then use multilateral Touml;rnqvist indices to aggregate outputs and inputs separately and show that the resulting series are robust to alternative measures of the reference rate. The difference between the output and input index provides a measure of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and an implicit price index is also derived. Results suggest that productivity growth in Luxembourg's banking sector has been high since the mid-1990s, displaying volatile but persistent dynamics and moving pro-cyclically. Productivity varies widely across banks but larger banks (in terms of total assets) tend to be more productive