EFFICIENCY IN ITALIAN SAVING BANKS: IS UNITY THE STRENGTH?

This study investigates the Italian SBs sector efficiency over the 2010 –2015 period. The measure of efficiency, in the first stage, is estimated via Data Envelopment Analysis – Slack Based Model. In the second stage we compare the performance of SBs belonging to bank groups with those stand-alone via Policy Evaluation. Results show that when comparing SBs belonging to a banks group with stand-alone SBs, although a positive but not significant ATT, we find no relevant differences between the SBs part of group and the stand-alone. However, with reference to Technical Efficiency the stand-alone SBs experience the worst performance while after an insight into the inefficiency decomposition it is clear that difficulties are due to managerial inefficiency.