Relative Efficiency of Canadian Banks: A Three-Stage Network Bootstrap DEA

In this study, we focus on how banks can enhance their efficiency in the utilization of resources to ensure their economic sustainability. We propose a novel three-stage (production, investment, and revenue generation) network Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with bootstrapping to evaluate the performance of the six big Canadian banks for the period 2000–2017, amid the 2007 financial crisis and the increasing competition level due to new technologies. We identify the best practices in each stage that can be used as benchmarks by other banks to improve their economic sustainability. Our results indicate that the 2007 financial crisis resulted in lower efficiencies in the performance of Canadian banks. This decline was not substantial for the production and investment stages when the revenue generation stage received the greatest hit. In addition, we observed that the individual banks did not have consistent performance in the different stages. Finally, we compared our model with the black box DEA model and concluded that the network DEA provides more insightful and accurate results in terms of banks’ efficiencies.