Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the interrelationships among default risk, capital and efficiency of the Indian banking system over 1990-2011. This study also took into account the impact of ownership on these interrelationships Design/methodology/approach – This paper employed Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Windows Analysis to estimate efficiency levels and trends of individual banks. This paper then used a model of seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE) to examine the interrelationships among default risk, capital and efficiency. Findings – This study found a two-way negative association between efficiency and default risk, and between capital ratio and default risk. However, this study found a two-way positive relationship between capital ratio and only profit efficiency. Public banks behaved differently from private banks regarding the association between capital and efficiency. Moreover, public banks had greater probability of default risk, lower capital ratio but higher efficiency level than private banks. Further, default risk, capital ratio and efficiency of the Indian banking system increased over time, but the two formers were driven by public banks while the latter was driven by private banks. Practical implications – The findings of this study appear to favour capital ratio as an efficient tool to improve efficiency and reduce default risk of the Indian banking system. Originality/value – This paper is the first investigating the interrelationships between bank risk, capital and efficiency of the Indian banking system, where bank risk is measured by Z-score value and efficiency is captured by cost, revenue and profit efficiencies, and then considering the impact of agency issues on these interrelationships.

No abstract

Given considerable changes in the Vietnamese banking environment brought about by significant reforms towards liberalization during the last two decades, this study investigates the evolution of competition and efficiency, compares the competition and efficiency of state-owned banks to joint-stock banks, and then tests the “quiet life” hypothesis in this industry over the period 2000–2014. This study employs the efficiency-adjusted Lerner index (i.e., market power) to capture competition, and the cost efficiency estimated by a Fourier-flexible function stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to capture bank efficiency. This study firstly finds a slight improvement of competition and cost efficiency in the Vietnamese banking sector over the analysis period. Secondly, there are no significant differences in competition and cost efficiency level between state-owned and joint-stock banks. Thirdly, a positive causality running from competition to cost efficiency is documented, providing evidence of supporting the “quiet life” hypothesis. Finally, positive efficiency effects of the banks’ capital ratio and size are found, while insignificant impacts of the growth of GDP per capita and 2007 global financial crisis were observed. The results are strongly robust to a variety of tests. The findings suggest pro-competition, pro-capitalization and pro-size expansion policies in the Vietnamese banking sector if targeting at improving the cost efficiency of Vietnamese banks.

No abstract

Vietnam carries a highly diverse practice of traditional medicine in which various combinations of herbs have been widely used as remedies for many types of diseases. Poor hand-written records and current text-based databases, however, perplex the process of conventionalizing and evaluating canonical therapeutic effects. In efforts to reorganize the valuable information, we provide the VIETHERB database (http://vietherb.com.vn/) for herbs documented in Vietnamese traditional medicines. This database is constructed with confidence to provide users with information on herbs and other side information including metabolites, diseases, morphologies, and geographical locations for each individual species. Our data in this release consist of 2,881 species, 10,887 metabolites, 458 geographical locations, and 8,046 therapeutic effects. The numbers of species− metabolite, species−therapeutic effect, species−morphology, and species−distribution binary relationships are 17,602, 2,718, 11,943, and 16,089, respectively. The information on Vietnamese herbal species can be easily accessed or queried using their scientific names. Searching for species sharing side information can be simply done by clicking on the data. The database primarily serves as an open source facilitating users in studies of modernizing traditional medicine, computer-aided drug design, conservation of endangered plants, and other relevant experimental sciences.

No abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the operational efficiency and effects of market concentration and diversification on the efficiency of Chinese and Indian banks in the 1997-2011 period. Design/methodology/approach This study employs the two-stage bootstrap procedure of Simar and Wilson (2007) to obtain valid inferences on the efficiency scores and the efficiency determinants. Findings Using data set for each country separately, the authors found that the bias-corrected cost efficiency displays an upward trend in Chinese and Indian banks. This trend is consistent with profit efficiency among Chinese banks, but the trend is unclear in Indian banks. Market concentration is negatively related to cost and profit efficiencies of Chinese banks. However, market concentration is positively associated with cost efficiency, but unrelated to profit efficiency of Indian banks. In Chinese banks, diversification of revenue, earning assets and non-lending earning assets are associated with increasing profit efficiency, but their effects to cost efficiency are not clear. In Indian banks, diversification of earning assets increases profit efficiency while there are cost efficiency losses from diversification of revenue and earning assets. Practical implications Bank regulators and supervisors in China should consider establishing policies to reduce market concentration and encourage diversification of revenue, earning assets and non-lending earning assets, while increasing concentration and diversification of earning assets should be encouraged in Indian banks. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study employing the double bootstrap procedure proposed by Simar and Wilson (2007) which can address the problem of the two-stage data envelopment analysis or SFA estimator in the efficiency literature on Chinese and Indian banks that efficiency scores obtained in the first stage are inter-dependent, and hence violating the basic assumption in regression analysis in the second stage.

This study identifies managerial behaviour in Vietnamese banks between the years 2000 and 2014, based on the managerial framework of banks, as identified by Rossi et al. (2009). This framework is built on the interrelationships between efficiency, risk, capital and diversification. This study uses the Z-score to measure insolvency risk, the SFA to estimate cost efficiency, the ratio of total equity to total assets to capture bank capital, and the HHI index to measure the diversification of revenue and earning assets. The results from the 3SLS estimator indicate that revenue diversification has an insignificant impact on insolvency risk, capital ratio and cost efficiency, but earning assets diversification has a negative effect on these three variables, supporting "classical diversification", "economic capital" and "monitoring" behaviours. Moreover, a decline in cost efficiency leads to a rise in insolvency risk, implying "bad management" behaviour; an increase in risk results in a reduction in cost efficiency, indicating "bad luck" behaviour; and a reduction in capital ratio in the poorly capitalized banks leads to a growth in risk, suggesting "moral hazard" behaviour. The results remain strongly robust when using an alternative risk measurement (the loan loss provision ratio) and an alternative SFA model.