The study examines the relationship between the consequential social cost of market power (i.e. welfare performance of banks) and cost efficiency using data covering the period 2009 to 2017 from the Ghanaian banking industry.,The study adopts the ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed effect (FE) panel regression and the quantile regression (QR) approaches to control for heterogeneity and provide increased room for policy relevance. The two-stage least squares instrumental variables (2SLS-IV) regression is used to ensure the robustness of the findings against the problem of possible reverse causality.,The results indicate a positive relationship between banks' welfare performance and cost efficiency, which suggests that greater cost efficiency hedges welfare losses. In other words, welfare gains and cost-efficient banks are not mutually exclusive. Also, the results show evidence that the sensitivity of welfare gain to cost efficiency depends on the knowledge of local market dynamics. Further, the findings from the QR estimation suggest that, but for welfare loss at low (Q.25) to the median (Q.50) quantiles, cost efficiency is a necessary and sufficient condition to hedge the welfare losses.,The results demonstrate that financial consumer protection cannot be achieved without cost efficiency in the presence of both foreign banks and high market knowledge. Therefore, our paper suggests an integrated cost efficiency policy approach that has the complementary effect of a robust information sharing mechanism and incentives to hedge against welfare losses in the banking sector of emerging economies. Moreover, if welfare gain is synonymous with cost-efficient banks, then the presence of a quiet life is typical of financial consumer protection.,This study provides insight into the importance of cost efficiency to the public policy of financial consumer protection in an era of foreign banks' dominance. From the review of prior literature, this paper is the first to apply the QR estimation technique to examine the effect of cost efficiency throughout the conditional distribution of bank welfare performance rather than just the conditional mean effect of cost efficiency.

中文翻译：

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银行的成本效率和福利绩效：来自新兴经济体的证据

该研究使用加纳银行业2009年至2017年的数据研究了市场支配力所带来的社会成本（即银行的福利绩效）与成本效率之间的关系。该研究采用固定的普通最小二乘（OLS）效果（FE）面板回归和分位数回归（QR）方法来控制异质性并为政策相关性提供更大的空间。采用两阶段最小二乘工具变量（2SLS-IV）回归来确保结果的稳健性，以应对可能的反向因果关系问题。结果表明，银行的福利绩效与成本效率之间存在正相关关系，这表明更高的成本效率可以对冲福利损失。换句话说，福利收益和具有成本效益的银行不是相互排斥的。此外，结果表明，福利收益对成本效率的敏感性取决于当地市场动态的知识。此外，QR估计的结果表明，但对于低（Q.25）到中位数（Q.50）分位数的福利损失，成本效率是对冲福利损失的必要和充分条件。在外国银行和高市场知识的共同作用下，如果没有成本效率就无法实现金融消费者保护。因此，我们的论文提出了一种综合成本效率政策方法，该方法具有强大的信息共享机制和对冲新兴经济体银行业福利损失的激励措施的补充作用。此外，如果福利收益是具有成本效益的银行的代名词，因此，在外国银行占主导地位的时代，本研究提供了成本效率对金融消费者保护公共政策的重要性的见解。从现有文献的回顾来看，本文是第一个应用QR估计技术来考察整个银行福利绩效的条件分布中成本效率的影响，而不仅仅是成本效率的条件均值。