Settore bancario e frontiere di efficienza

From the 1980s the architecture of the Italian banking system underwent a process of reform aimed at introducing higher degrees of competition among intermediaries and at enhancing their efficiency, in order to enable it to comply with the European integration process and to face the new challenges of rapidly globalizing markets. While in the 1980s the banking regulation slowly adapted to European rules and to a more liberalized contest, in the 1990s privatizations, liberalizations, and higher competition fueled concentration in the banking system. The paper studies these transformations using a dataset gathering balance sheet and loss-and-profit data, at firm level, for a wide number of banks, covering almost the entire system, between 1979 and 2000. The analysis is based on nonparametric estimation of the technology set through the DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) and tries to determine the effects of new regulation and institutional frameworks on the efficiency of the banking system and of individual banks.