Guohua Feng and Apostolos Serletis, "Efficiency and Productivity of the US
Banking Industry, 1998-2005: Evidence from the Fourier Cost Function
Satisfying Global Regularity Conditions", Journal of Applied Econometrics,
Vol. 24, No. 1, 2009, pp. 105-138.

This paper provides estimates of bank efficiency and productivity in the 
United States, over the period from 1998 to 2005, for 12 bank subgroups. 
Correspondingly, we have 12 data sets for this paper, one for each bank 
subgroup. The dataset called "group_1.txt" is used for the estimation of 
the largest subgroup; dataset called "group_2.txt" is used for the 
estimation of the second largest subgroup; and so on.

All data files, which are ASCII files in DOS format, are zipped in the 
file fs-data.zip. Unix users should use "unzip -a".

The data used in this study are all obtained from the Reports of Income 
and Condition, posted on the website of Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; see 
http://www.chicagofed.org/economic_research_and_data/commercial_bank_data.cfm.

In each of the 12 datasets, there are 11 columns:

Column 1 gives the date, i.e. the year for which the other variables are
         obtained;

Column 2 gives the total cost, which is the sum of three input costs (labor,
         capital and borrowed funds);

Column 3 gives the wage rate for labor, p1, which is equal to total salaries
         and benefits divided by the number of full-time employees; 

Column 4 gives the interest rate for borrowed funds, p2, which is equal to
         total interest expense divided by total deposits and purchased funds.

Column 5 gives the price of physical capital, p3, which is equal to expenses
         on premises and equipment divided by premises and fixed assets; 

Column 6 gives consumer loans, y1; 

Column 7 gives non-consumer loans, y2, which is composed of industrial and
         commercial loans and real estate loans; 

Column 8 gives securities, y3, including all non-loan financial assets,
	 i.e., all financial and physical assets minus the sum of consumer
	 loans, non-consumer loans, securities, and equity;

Column 9 gives financial equity capital;

Column 10 gives non-traditional banking activities. In obtaining this
	  variable, We assume that all non-interest income is generated from
	  off-balance-sheet assets, and that these non-traditional
	  activities yield the same rate of return on assets (ROA) as
	  traditional activities do. Thus, we transform the
	  off-balance-sheet income into an equivalent asset;

Column 11 gives the time trend.

All outputs, total cost, equity, and non-traditional banking activities are
deflated by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to the base year 1998.