This article uses the frontier technique to highlight the differences in the impact of the global financial crisis on the efficiency of 783 commercial banks from the EU during the period 2004-2010. We emphasise the distinctions between large and small banks, publicly traded and privately held banks, as well as the statuses of banks' country of origin, especially for the year in which they joined the EU and held eurozone membership. Our results show that the crisis has a significant and positive impact on both the cost and profit inefficiencies of the commercial banks from the EU, and that this impact is higher on eurozone banks. In terms of cost efficiency, the most affected by the crisis are the large publicly traded banks, operating in old members of the EU. With regard to the profit inefficiency, the global financial crisis seems to have had a lower impact on the large public banks.

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In this study we assess the impact of corporate governance on the risk investment behavior of firms and its implications on firms' growth rate. Using a sample of non-financial companies from 10 countries over a period leading to the recent global financial crisis, we documented that the corporate governance has a nonlinear (inverted U-shape) impact on the companies' investment risk, meaning that the investment risk is increasing up to a level of corporate governance of 0.61 (as measured by our comprehensive index), while at higher levels of corporate governance the investment risk is decreasing. For the models of sales growth and assets growth it is shown that predicted investment risk has a positive effect on firms' growth measures. Moreover, the two growth models are not moving independently and a shock to one of the growth measures (sales or assets) affects the other growth measure in the same direction. Additionally, we evaluated the effect of financial crisis on both the growth measures and the risk measure. The effect of financial crisis was captured in both measures in 2009, with higher impact on the growth of sales.