Survey of the banking literature

Abstract

There are a large number of papers in the literature on banking from many different stances. Survey papers (see below) show the diversity of the approaches taken by many of the authors to the problem. Most of the work considered banks as the DMUs as this is useful for the regulator or for comparisons with banks in other countries. Many of the bank branch papers treated a branch as the DMU and could yield more managerially useful literature – but neither of these statements is absolute as there are many well supported arguments for both types of studies. It should be noted that there are hundreds of papers on banking and the following are just our selection of the highlights of this literature.