Cross Country Comparison of Efficiency in Investment Banking

This paper aims to identify the framework for comparing investment banks efficiencies across nations. In order to overcome traditional limitations two methods are adopted: first, where separate frontiers are estimated to check for the
existence of structural differences between the countries; and second method which accounts for the influences of environmental factors on the industry, by including indicator of these factors in a definition of a common frontier. We use translog cost and profit function in order to measure X-efficiency. Data set consist from more
than 900 investment banks from G7 countries (US, UK, Japan, Italy, Germany, France and Canada) and Switzerland over the period 2000-2007.