In this article, we use the data envelopment analysis to measure the efficiency of banks before and after credit rating is taken into consideration and we also employ the Malmquist Productivity Index to measure the total factor productivity changes from 2001 to 2003. The results are as follows: (1) There is a positive relationship between the efficiency scores and credit rating, and thus, the credit rating can be a representative to evaluate the performance and quality of a bank; (2) We use the Wilconxon two-sample test of nonparametric statistic to test the influences of credit rating. The empirical result shows that the credit rating is proven to influence the efficiency of banks; (3) The efficiency scores improve in both investment grade (above tw BBB-) and speculation grade (under tw BBB-), when credit rating is taken into consideration. The empirical results show that the efficiency scores of banks with a high credit rating improved relatively more when compared to banks with a lower credit rating; (4) In this research we also adopt the Malmquist index to observe the productivity and efficiency changes from year to year. We obtain results whereby the improvement of efficiency may be influenced greatly both from pure technical and scale efficiency changes.

Few derived versions based on the classic bank run model have taken into account the framing effect of general lenders. The purpose of this study is to revisit the issue and discuss a model of bank run equilibrium combined with biased risk preference, which is applied to analyze how portfolio allocation and liquidity buffer in commercial banks are affected by liquidation cost and the reference point. The results suggest the condition on which the liquidity buffer of a particular bank should provide. Liquidation cost is positively correlated with the lower bound of liquidity buffer. The effect of the reference point on liquidity buffer partially depends on the slope of yield curve term structure. Higher reference point could typically cause a lower portion of long-term investment.

The synergy between deposit-taking and lending is the specialness of banking institutions as financial intermediaries. The activities from both balance sheet and off-balance sheet could share the cost of holding liquid assets, which is based on the fact that draw-downs on loan commitments and withdrawals on deposits are not perfectly correlated. However, it matters to reveal the dynamic connections between the two sources of liquidity risk for the purpose of analyzing the real impact on individual banks from a more microscopic perspective. As the evidence shows in this study, a winner-take-all effect is hidden in the synergy and could cause local double cash outflow from particular banks. It also provides new insights on liquidity management of commercial banks.