Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/55602
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
Working Papers No. 11-1
Publisher: 
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston, MA
Abstract: 
The measurement of bank output, a difficult and contentious issue, has become even more important in the aftermath of the devastating financial crisis of recent years. In this paper, we argue that models of banks as processors of information and transactions imply a quantity measure of bank service output based on transaction counts instead of balances of loans and deposits. Compiling new and comparable output measures for the United States and a range of European countries, we show that our counts-based output series exhibit significantly different growth patterns from those of our balances-based output series over the years 1997 to 2009. Since the U.S. official statistics rely on counts while European statistics rely on balances, this implies a potentially considerable bias in the estimate of bank output growth in Europe vis-à-vis that in the United States.
JEL: 
E01
E44
O47
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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