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Many states still limit or prohibit commercial bank branching. In addition, the McFadden Act prevents banks from branching across state lines. It has been suggested that anti‐branching laws inhibit competition in the banking industry. This follows from the notion that bank markets are localized, and that anti‐branching laws prevent banks from penetrating local markets adjacent to their main offices. Two interesting hypotheses arise from this conjecture. First, do banks operating in unit‐banking states have a profit advantage over their counterparts in states that allow state‐wide branching? And second, is there any significant difference in profitability between banks in limited‐branching states and banks in state‐branching states? In other words, are there diminishing returns to branching deregulation? Research reported in this paper answers these questions.

Although it was predicted that bank branches would quickly become obsolete in a computerized society, the reality is that many full‐service branches are not closing but rather evolving to meet changing needs. The role of the branch manager is crucial, and is also changing. In particular, managers are expected to take a lead in marketing activities. A questionnaire study was carried out to examine managers’ changing roles, using two samples of branch managers, one from Canada and one from Spain. Managers were asked to rate 21 function variables on their importance in bank management and in facing new market trends. Differences were found between the two samples, as were similarities: both identified managerial ability, strategic autonomy of the branch and business development through increased marketing ability, as important building blocks for the future role of branches and their managers.

The available evidence is partly consistent and partly inconsistent with a negative association of branching restrictions and the number of banking offices. In this paper, I present evidence that the failure to consistently find such a negative association of branching restrictions and banking offices is quite robust. I suggest that the endogeneity of the banking restrictions and regulators' unmodeled behavior are the basic source of the inconsistency. I conclude that there is no evidence that suggests substantial changes in the number of banking offices with the introduction of interstate branching.

Service is a vital, multi‐dimensional ingredient of the relationship between customers and their bank, or, more especially, their branch. Further, word‐of‐mouth recommendation is a valuable source of new business and is often based upon the range of services available. It is therefore an important function of branch management to monitor on a daily basis the quality of service given to customers and, more globally, for Head Office management to have available an occasional measure of the levels of service available at individual branches.

This chapter examines the transition in the US banking industry from a community to a national logic, developing a general model to explain how and when shifts in institutional logics occur. Based on qualitative historical evidence and discrete-time event history analysis predicting the introduction of legislation favoring the national logic, this chapter proposes that dramatic exogenous events such as the Great Depression or more gradual processes such as modernization favored the industry's transition to the national logic, but that such exogenous events had a greater influence in areas where strategic actors could capitalize on them. The qualitative evidence presented here suggests that struggles involving organizational identity and “legitimacy politics” played an important role in the shift in logics. Our theorizing focuses on how, when the environment changes in an incremental fashion, actors are primed with new possibilities, which may shift their collective identities, but when environmental changes are discontinuous, they provide actors strategic opportunities to alter the balance of logics in the environment.

This research aims to empirically analyze the spatial bank branch network in Canada. The authors study the market structure (both industrial and geographic concentrations) via its own or adjacent postal areas. The empirical framework of this study considers branch density (the ratio of the total number of branches to area size) by employing a spatial two-way fixed effects model. The main finding of this study is that there are no effects associated with market structure, however, there are strong spatial within and nearby effects associated with the socioeconomic variables. In addition, the authors also study the effect of spatial competition from rival banks: they find that large banks and small banks tend to avoid markets dominated by their competitors.

This chapter analyzes the relations among bank mergers, changes in boards and their networks, and changes in the global footprint of merging banks. We examine all mergers involving U.S. banks with foreign branches between 1986 and 2004. We find that while the largest banks have become even larger through mergers, their boards have stayed roughly the same size with the same pattern of connections, leaving banks relatively less central in the intercorporate network. And while global banks previously had more globally oriented boards, this is no longer the case, as the link between board networks and strategy has become more tenuous. Because global banks were particularly prone to merging, the average commercial bank in the U.S. is now far more domestically oriented than firms in most other industries. American banks have thus become more domestic at the same time that the rest of American industry has grown much more global.

Purpose: The present study investigates how the performance of Greek bank branching varies when the external environment causes dramatic changes that are reflected in recession and capital control effects.

Design/Methodology: A unique dataset of accounting Profit and Loss statements of retail branches of a systemic Greek commercial bank, closely supervised by the European Central Bank (ECB), is utilized. A profit bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model is selected to measure the bank branch efficiency. The derived efficiency estimates are analyzed through a second-stage panel data regression analysis against a set of efficiency drivers related to branch profitability, diversification of income, branch size, and branch activity.

Findings: The results indicate that recession negatively affects branch efficiency in the short and long run. The occurrence of recession significantly intensifies the efficiency premium of branch profitability, reduces the efficiency premium of diversification of income (i.e., a negative efficiency effect is recorded during the early recession period), while mitigating the generally negative efficiency effect of branch size. The analysis of efficiency effects from the deep recession period that encompasses capital controls reveals the importance of diversification of income for the improvement of profit efficiency at bank branch level.

Originality/Value: This is the first branch banking study that explores branch efficiency alteration and the dynamic of branch efficiency drivers when the economy suddenly enters recession and afterwards when conditions are becoming extremely difficult and consequently capital controls are imposed on the economy.

London Clearing Banks (LCBs) are currently endeavouring to improve their overall branch delivery system by adopting strategies which promote branches as marketing centres. This approach is necessary because of the substantial inherent disadvantages associated with the branch network. Branches are expensive and as distribution channels they are less than efficient. This inefficiency stems from the fact that customers need to be “induced” into them and also because branches are relatively inflexible and difficult to adapt to changing market conditions. As a consequence the strategies are identified and discussed, which are currently being implemented by banks in an endeavour simultaneously to improve both customer satisfaction and the efficiency of branch networks by making them more responsive to the needs of the market.

A decade ago the threat posed to branch networks by emerging alternative distribution channels was largely perceived of in terms of the eventual effect they might have on the size and number of operational branches. Although still a valid concern, this consideration has proved to be of less significance and certainly of less academic interest than the innovative approaches of banks in seeking to preserve branch networks as important components of their distribution mix. Examines the different strategic responses of the banks to the problem of what to do with their branches and concludes that these responses all have one important characteristic in common, namely, that they are all market focused and profit based.