Trademarking status and economic efficiency among commercial banks: Some evidence for the UK

As competition in the banking sector has intensified over the last two decades, commercial banks have started to use trademarks to differentiate their products and services from those offered by their competitors. Less clear are the implications of the trademarking activities on the commercial banks' performance. In this paper, we compare the cost and profit efficiency of trademarking and non-trademarking banks in the UK, over the period 2001-2013 using stochastic frontier methods. We use Propensity Score Matching techniques to identify a sample of non-trademarking banks which share the same characteristics as the trademarking banks to ensure that variations in the efficiency between the commercial banks in our sample can be attributed to their trademarking status only. We then explicitly test the hypothesis that trademarking and non-trademarking banks share the same cost and profit frontiers. We cannot reject the hypothesis of a common cost and profit frontier. We also find that trademarking banks tend to be more profit efficient than non-trademarking banks while there is no significant difference between the cost efficiency scores of trademarking and non-trademarking banks.