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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 paper studies the density of bank branches in districts of Slovakia and aims to identify determinants that explain or justify districtural differences in the density of bank branches.

Bank branch density is measured by the number of branches in a district, and banks are further differentiated by size and profile. Potential determinants of bank branch density are sought through univariate and bivariate Poisson regressions amongst economic factors, socioeconomic factors, technological factors, urbanization factors, and branch market concentration.

Using data from 2016, it has been found that branch numbers in districts are determined chiefly by five factors that describe their economic development, population size with its characteristics, and existent branch concentration. The spatial distribution of bank branches in the territory of Slovakia is not random, but is found to be affected by environmental factors measurable at the districtural level. Only 22 Slovak districts representing administrative or economic centers are expected to be over-branched.

The study helps to identify factors that need be accounted for in planning and redesigning of branch networks or in implementing mergers and acquisitions on a bank level. The results are also useful in regional policy and regulatory oversight.

The present study is unique since the decision-making processes of Slovak commercial banks in planning the location and density of their branch networks have not been rationalized and researched as of yet.

Branching is one of the crucial strategic non-price actions for banks. Previous studies on the impact of state ownership upon banks focus on bank lending behavior. This paper aims to offer a novel investigation of how state ownership affects bank branching behavior by examining state-controlled commercial banks (SCCBs) in the context of the largest developing and transitional country China.

The two-part model (TPM) is applied to analyze the branching decision process. In the first stage, the dependent variable is the choice of bank branching dynamics and in the second stage the dependent variable is the number of new branches or the number of closed branches. For robustness check, the ordered probit selection model allowing for interdependence of the two stage decisions is also employed.

Using a unique dataset of bank branches in China, this paper finds that the branching decisions of Chinese SCCBs are driven by both profit motivated factors including population size, population density, income level, financial development and banking competition and politically motivated factors as represented with the proportion of SOEs. As a comparison, branching decisions of joint-stock banks in China are fully determined by profit motivated factors.

First, this study is the first to explore the effect of state ownership on bank branching decisions, providing a new insight on the literature regarding to the impact of state ownership on bank decisions. Second, this study explores the potential effect of politically motivated factors on bank branching decisions, filling the gap in bank branching literature. Third, this study can contribute to bank branching literature by enriching the limited understanding of how SCCBs make branching decisions. Lastly, this study applies novel empirical strategies to analyze bank branching decisions, including the TPM and the ordered probit selection model.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate if access to local branch infrastructure of the farm credit system institutions (FCS), banks and credit unions (BCU), and alternative financial services (AFS) providers is related to the use of credit from non-traditional lenders (NTLs). The focus is on beginning and women operators who are typically credit constrained and thus more likely to suffer from closures of bank branches and consolidation of traditional agricultural lenders.

Informed by Detragiache et al. (2000), the authors specify farmers’ use of loans as a function of their access to credit (measured by the branch density of each lender type) along with operator’s and operation’s controls. The measures of loans by NTLs (number, use, share and lender type) require the use of Poisson, Probit, Tobit and Multinomial Logit techniques. This study utilizes individual producer data from the 2018 Agricultural Resource Management Survey and 2018 county-level branch density data for FCS, BCU and AFS providers.

Access to credit from FCS is helpful to BFRs only, while access to AFS is associated with the use of loans from NTLs by women but not by BFRs. As expected, access to BCU credit matters for the use of loans from NTLs, with a complementary effect for BFRs but a substitution effect for women’s use of such loans.

There are no studies on local agricultural credit markets in the US that evaluate the implications from changes in access to credit on credit-constrained borrowers and their use of NTLs’ credit.

The purpose of this paper is to study the “underbanked” – those who already possess bank accounts but are patrons of alternative financial services (AFS) providers at the same time.

Linking the FDIC unbanked/underbanked surveys of nationally represented households with FDIC bank information and local MSA demographics, demographic and economic profiles of the underbanked households are examined, together with the determinants of their choice of nonbank financial services.

The author finds that bank fees are associated with the likelihood for households to obtain AFS, especially nonbank credit. Households’ attitudes and experience with banks are important in the choice of getting AFS. Furthermore, most underbanked households used AFS temporarily, partly reflecting rather informed and calculated financial decisions.

The results from this paper provide implications for different types of AFS users. For example, the use of transactional AFS responds to the availability of online or mobile banking; meanwhile, it is also sensitive to branch closure. Users of nonbank credits are likely to be price savvy, and these products serve as valuable alternatives for short-term financing, especially during unfavorable economic situation.

Better understanding of the underbanked could help banks tailor to existing clients’ needs, for instance, providing innovative short-term credit products for those with little or impaired credit history. The study also helps policy makers re-evaluate banking regulations since the Great Recession. As regulations squeezed bank profits in certain areas and forced banks to consolidate, come alongside higher bank fees, potential branch closure and loss of service, which ultimately forced banked individuals to the less regulated alternative providers.

The analysis utilizes a comprehensive set of variables, from household social-economic characteristics to local banking industry characteristics, together with households’ subjective opinions of their banking institutions. The focus on the underbanked brings attention to this underserved population and discusses areas where banks can improve. The study contributes to the understanding of AFS users, draws implications for regulation toward banking and shadow banking.

Despite recent advances, neither organizational studies nor the scholarship on economic resilience has systematically addressed how the ecologies of organizations that populate local economies can serve as infrastructures for responding proactively to economic shocks. Using county-level data, this study analyzes relationships between the prevalence of organizational alternatives to shareholder value-oriented (SVO) corporations within a particular locality and its unemployment levels during and after the Great Recession. The results support the hypothesis that the presence of such alternative organizations can enhance the capacities of local economies to resist and recover from recession shocks. Cooperative, municipal, and community-based enterprises, research universities, and nonprofits more generally were associated with greater resistance to the recession shock and stronger recoveries – specifically, lower surges in unemployment rates from 2007 to 2010 and greater reductions in unemployment rates from 2010 to 2016. By contrast, SVO corporations were associated with greater surges in unemployment and perhaps weaker recoveries. Providing a proof of concept, this study opens up new lines of inquiry for organizational studies by linking organizational ecologies to the promotion of collective efficacy and a more broadly shared prosperity in economic life.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between bank market power and stability of financial institutions in Italy between 2001 and 2012. The authors first test the existence of a U-shaped relationship between market power and financial stability. Second, they regress the market share indicator on bank risk-taking to underline whether financial stability is affected by increasing or decreasing the market power of banks. Third, they explore whether this relationship is affected by the size, level of capitalization and credit insolvency of banks.

Relying on highly territorially disaggregated data at labor market areas level, the authors estimate the impact of bank market power and other explanatory variables on a proxy of risk taking behavior such as the banking “stability inefficiency” derived simultaneously from the estimation of a stability stochastic frontier. Bank market power is taken into account through an individual measure based on loans. Financial stability is calculated through the Z-score. The authors use, as risk-taking measure, the stability inefficiency whose estimation approach is the stochastic frontier analysis.

The empirical evidence shows that the inefficiency of financial stability is found to be U-shaped related with respect to the measure of market power. Bank size is an essential factor in explaining the relationship between bank market power and risk-taking. Cooperative banks have fewer incentives to gain market power to better perform in term of risks. The reform of the cooperative banks that took recently place in Italy is not supported by the data.

The relationship between bank market power and financial stability has been analyzed using a rich sample of cooperative, commercial and popular banks in Italy over the 2001-2012 period. The authors rely on labor market areas being sub-regional geographical areas where the bulk of the labor force lives and works. The paper investigates the market power-stability link considering both cooperative and non-cooperative banks. Indeed, specific attention has been paid on cooperative banks because of their mission in favor of the local community as only few studies, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, examine cooperative banking.

To examine whether Japanese commercial banks exhibited economies of scale and economies of density at the time when the mega‐merger wave in Japanese banking began in the late 1990s. Since this merger wave has not yielded efficiencies, this analysis aims to shed light on whether banks, at the start of the wave, had reason to believe that larger banks would be more efficient.

Using a modified version of the translog cost function, the analysis estimates economies of scale and economies of density for Japanese city banks, trust banks, and regional banks. Then, the relationship between size and economies of scale/density and that between profitability and scale/density are explored using regression analysis.

Results suggest that larger banks (as measured by value of assets/loans/ deposits/investments, and number of employees/branches) were more likely to be in the decreasing/constant returns to scale/density region than smaller banks, The finding was statistically significant for all three types of Japanese banks. On average, city banks exhibited diseconomies of scale/density; trust banks exhibited constant returns to scale and increasing returns to density, and regional banks exhibited increasing returns to scale and density. This suggests that unions between city banks and either regional banks or trust banks may have been more likely to yield cost‐efficiencies, and raises questions concerning the efficiency motivations of the mega‐bank mergers. The findings further indicate that banks with higher sales were more likely to have exploited scale/density efficiencies, and that banks with higher net incomes were more likely to be in the increasing returns region.

This paper suggests that the mega‐merger wave in Japan in the late 1990s may not have been motivated by a desire for greater efficiencies through utilization of under‐utilized branch networks. Unlike other studies, this analysis differentiates between economies of scale and economies of density.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a model that yields a sustainability performance index for Islamic banks (IBs). This index is expected to account for stakeholders’ viewpoints while considering sustainability and Maqasid Al-Shariah as bases.

First, based on the relevant literature review refined through consultations with academic, banking and Shariah experts, the main stakeholders and their corresponding lists of relevant attributes and sub-attributes are identified. Then, adopting a multi-attribute utility approach and based on a second step of interviews with experts, an aggregated index is suggested. Finally, the developed index is applied to five famous Islamic banking groups over the period 2005–2019.

Empirical evidence shows that the banks used in the implementation do not achieve high scores of the suggested index. This can be interpreted through a lack of Islamic normative aspects and low adherence to sustainability practices. Specifically, they are not functioning on a justice basis and are deficient in providing sufficient varieties of Islamic products. They are also more interested in economic sustainability and are not involved in environmental and social ones.

The developed index not only considers the compliance of the banking activities with Shariah, but it also addresses their sustainability from the main stakeholders’ perspectives. The suggested model provides a transparent performance evaluation tool for IBs omitting all causes of conflict of interests and certifies the fairness of the resulting assessments.

The purpose of this paper is to present a solution strategy for the analysis of cable networks which includes an extension to the force density method (FDM) in an attempt to support cable elements when they become slack. The ability to handle slack cable elements in the analysis is particularly important especially in cases where the original cable lengths are predefined, i.e. the cable structure has already been constructed, and there is a need for further analysis to account for additional loading such as wind. The solution strategy is implemented in a software application.

The development of the software required the implementation of the FDM for the analysis of cable networks and its extension to handle constraints. The implemented constraints included the ability to preserve the length in the stressed or the unstressed state of predefined cable elements. In addition, cable statics are incorporated with the development of the cable equation and its modification to be able to be handled by the FDM .

The implementation of the solution strategy is presented through examples using the software which has been developed for these purposes.

The results suggest that for cable networks spanning large distances or cable elements with considerable self-weight the neglect of the cable slackening effects is not always conservative.