To provide these three services, banks incur financial and operating costs. In this study these costs
are captured by two types of expense, interest expense and operating expense. Descriptive statistics
for all five variables are provided in Table 1; all
variables are measured in hundred thousand 1980
rupees. Both service provision and resource use grew
fairly steadily during the period of our study. The
enormous size dispersion among banks also shows
up, with standard deviations of the five variables
generally being more than double their means.
We now consider the exogenous variables used in
the second step SFA explanatory regression. After
nationalization, the government and the RBI emphasized expansion of the banking sector into the suburban and rural areas. This influenced both the number
and the location of new branches, although the impact was greater on publicly-owned banks than on
privately-owned banks. The freedom to open
metropolitan branches was typically linked to the
opening of suburban and rural branches. Foreignowned banks were treated still another way. They
were not required to expand into suburban and rural
areas, but they did face tight restrictions on the
number of metropolitan branches they could open. It
is of interest to examine how this controlled branch
expansion policy influenced the performance of the
three types of bank. Four branch-related variables
included to capture these effects are:
zr = Number of branches in rural areas.
zs = Number of branches in suburban areas.
zu = Number of branches in urban areas.
zm = Number of branches in metropolitan areas.
Government regulations also compelled banks,
again to varying degrees, to lend to the priority
sectors. It is likely that a part of calculated efficiency
variation can be attributed to this lending policy. In
addition, in deference to Basle committee norms, the
riskiness of bank portfolios has become an important
issue. Increasingly, the decision-making freedom of
banks has been linked to their capital adequacy;
banks with satisfactory capital adequacy ratios are
now allowed to open branches without prior RBI
approval, and to raise equity from capital markets. It
is therefore of interest to determine the impact of
asset quality, as measured by capital adequacy, on
bank performance. These two considerations lead us