Evaluation and evolution of bank efficiency considering heterogeneity technology: An empirical study from China

The performances of different types of banks may vary due to heterogeneous technology, which can be examined by metafrontier analysis. However, the metafrontier constructed in most existing literature is concave, resulting in a biased estimation of efficiency. Based on 93 Chinese commercial banks over the period of 2005–2016, we first evaluate the banking efficiency by using the proposed data envelopment analysis (DEA) model, NCMeta-US-NSBM, which simultaneously incorporates a non-concave metafrontier technique, undesirable outputs, and super efficiency into a network slacks-based measure (NSBM) model. Subsequently, the evolution of banking efficiency during the study period is investigated on the basis of the Dagum Gini index and kernel density estimation methods. The main empirical results show the following. 1) There exists significant disparity/heterogeneity in banking efficiency for overall efficiency, productivity efficiency, and profitability efficiency. 2) The results of the technology gap ratio (TGR) and the evaluation of stated-owned banks (SOB), joint-stock banks (JSB), and city commercial banks (CCB) in the productivity stage are higher than those in the profitability stage, indicating that most of the banks have a large space for improvement, especially for SOB and JSB in the profitability stage. 3) The major contribution of the overall difference of banking efficiency in China is the intensity of the transvariation. 4) Although the kernel density estimations for different efficiency scores have similar distributions in corresponding years, the multilevel differentiation phenomenon of banking efficiency may appear after 2008.