The Productive Efficiency of Singapore Banks: An Application and Extension of the Barr et al. (1999) Approach

While a voluminous literature exists on the measurement of financial institution efficiency, little work has been directed at investigating the properties of data envelopment analysis (DEA) scores by examining the relationships between these scores and traditional measures of bank performance. Following the seminal work of Barr, Killgo, Siems and Zimmel (1999), this paper employs data on Singapore financial institutions for the period 1993 to 1999 to develop efficiency scores for Singapore banks. It then examines the manner in which derived DEA efficiency scores interact with traditional measures of profitability, size, risk and soundness.