Endogenous network efficiency, macroeconomy, and competition: Evidence from the Portuguese banking industry

Although performance analysis has become a vital part of the banking industry, research on the efficiency of Portuguese banking remains scarce and focused on discussing rankings to the detriment of unveiling its productive structure relative to its competition. This issue is of utmost importance considering the relevant transformations in the Portuguese economy over the last ten years. In this study, we developed a network productive structure comprising two paradigms (the production and intermediation approaches, respectively) to assess how market competition and other macro-economic variables impact bank efficiency and their feedback effects in Portugal. Unlike previous research, an integrated multi-layer perceptron (MLP)/hidden Markov model (HMM) was used for the first time to unveil endogeneity among banking competition, macro-economic variables, and the efficiency levels of the production and intermediation approaches in banking. The findings illustrate the pattern of interaction among these variables and verify that the production efficiency is the cornerstone of endogeneity in Portuguese banks. Policy makers will find the results helpful.