Performance and risk in the Brazilian banking industry Sáez Fernández, Francisco Javier Picazo Tadeo, Andrés José Jiménez Hernández, Ignacio Brazilian banking industry Commercial and investment banks Data Envelopment Analysis Directional distance function Performance Risk Andres J. Picazo-Tadeo aknowledges the financial support from the Generalitat Valenciana (project PROMETEO 2018/102). This paper assesses the technical performance of Brazilian banks while accounting for risk, which is considered as an undesirable outcome of banking. To this end, frontier techniques based on Data Envelopment Analysis and directional distance functions are applied to a sample of 124 banks and data for the six-year period 2014-19. Our main finding is that the Brazilian banking industry could notably increase its production of conventional outputs without additional input usage and while maintaining the same levels of risk. Besides, investment banks are found to be more efficient than commercial banks mainly because of their superior managerial performance. 2021-05-24T06:52:00Z 2021-05-24T06:52:00Z 2021-03-28 journal article Francisco Javier Sáez-Fernández, Andrés J. Picazo-Tadeo, Ignacio Jiménez-Hernández, Performance and risk in the Brazilian banking industry, Heliyon, Volume 7, Issue 3, 2021, e06524, ISSN 2405-8440, [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e06524] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/68640 10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e06524 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ open access Atribución 3.0 España Elsevier