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AbstractThis paper analyzes technical and scale efficiency of Austrian savings and cooperative banks. Non‐profit objectives are also considered with respect to input–output choice, which contributes to adequate performance measurements for alternative banks. Efficiency score estimates obtained via Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) reveal considerable potential for improvement in terms of intermediation efficiency. Several environmental determinants prove significant, but the cumulative predictive content of exogenous factors is rather modest. Bank efficiency improves in both underdeveloped and prosperous markets, while increased rival size and distance appear to be detriments to efficiency. A concluding discussion of confounding factors reveals the managerial, stakeholder, and policy implications of the results.

This paper examines branch exit from and entry into local banking markets in Austria from 1999 to 2012, as well as changes in concentration and several bank–borrower distance measures. Results from spatial regression models reveal that especially less developed and functionally distant municipalities suffer from branch withdrawal and financial desertification. Bank variety, and thus, choice decreases, for example, in (the vicinity of) communities with ageing population. Most examined processes are found to exhibit spatial correlation and so being geographically extensive. Potential adverse consequences of structural change for non‐urban markets should, thus, receive more attention from economic and regional policy.

The transmission process from policy-controlled interest rates to bank lending rates deserves reconsideration owing to the implementation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. Additional attention to the subject in Austria is due to several large banks which, in 2002, have been charged for not passing on interest rate decreases to their customers. I examine dynamic responses of commercial credit rates to changes in key policy rates and money market rates. Using Austrian data from 1995 to 2002, I show that strength and speed of interest rate transmission depend on whether rates go up or down. With the EMU, asymmetry in interest rate transmission partly declined. The speed of transmission and the relative importance of policy and money market rates for commercial credit rates also were affected.