banking costs generalized functional forms and estimation of economies of scale and scope recently researchers have claimed that the primitive cobb douglas production technology captures banking cost functions adequately these findings rule out scope economies and u shaped cost curves the rejection of the generalized flexible form postulated by the above authors is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to justify a cobb douglas specification using restricted generalized functional forms the authors find that the composite output cobb douglas specification is an inadequate description of banking cost technology translog specifications with multiple products capture the data best suggesting the presence of both scope and scale economies copyright 1989 by ohio state university press

deregulation consolidation and efficiency evidence from the spanish insurance industry this paper provides new information on the effects of deregulation and consolidation in financial services markets by analyzing the spanish insurance industry the sample period 1989 98 spans the introduction of the european union s eu third generation insurance directives which deregulated the eu insurance market deregulation has led to dramatic changes in the spanish insurance market the number of firms declined by 35 average firm size increased by 275 and unit prices declined significantly in both life and non life insurance we analyze the causes and effects of consolidation using modern frontier efficiency analysis to estimate cost technical and allocative efficiency as well as using malmquist analysis to measure total factor productivity tfp change the results show that many small inefficient and financially underperforming firms were eliminated from the market due to insolvency or liquidation as a result the market experienced significant growth in tfp over the sample period consolidation not only reduced the number of firms operating with increasing returns to scale but also increased the number operating with decreasing returns to scale hence many large firms should focus on improving efficiency by adopting best practices rather than on further growth

a test for subadditivity of the cost function with an application to the bell system stable url http links jstor org sici sici 0002 8282 28198409 2974 3a4 3c615 3aatfsot 3e2 0 co 3b2 rthe american economic review is currently published by american economic association your use of the jstor archive indicates your acceptance of jstor s terms and conditions of use available athttp www jstor org about terms html jstor s terms and conditions of use provides in part that unless you have obtainedprior permission you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles and you may use content inthe jstor archive only for your personal non commercial use please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work publisher contact information may be obtained athttp www jstor org journals aea html each copy of any part of a jstor transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission the jstor archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world the archive is supported by libraries scholarly societies publishers and foundations it is an initiative of jstor a not for profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology for more information regarding jstor please contact support jstor org http www jstor orgmon jul 2 16 52 19 2007

economies of vertical integration in the swiss electricity sector over the last two decades several european nations have introduced reforms to their electricity sector generally these reforms require a legal and functional unbundling of vertically integrated companies these unbundling processes may reduce the possibilities that exist to fruitfully exploit the advantages of vertical integration the goal of this paper is to empirically analyze the presence of economies of scale and vertical integration in the swiss electricity sector economies of vertical integration between electricity production and distribution result from reduced transaction costs better coordination of highly specific and interdependent investments and less financial risk different econometric specifications for panel data including a random effects and a random coefficients model have been used to estimate a quadratic multi stage cost function for a sample of electricity companies the empirical results reflect the presence of considerable economies of vertical integration and economies of scale for most of the companies considered in the analysis moreover the results suggest a variation in economies of vertical integration across companies due to unobserved heterogeneity

a model of the financial firm with imperfect asset and deposit elasticities abstract the paper develops an intertemporal model to estimate the production technology of financial firms such as banks price taking is testable in each separate market for assets and liabilities and competitive price taking is a nested special case such tests are applied both to outputs and inputs empirical results for a sample of banks in new york and new jersey indicate that price taking applies only in markets for labor and time deposits in markets for loans demand deposits cash and materials the price taking hypothesis is not accepted

the contribution of product mix versus efficiency and technical change in us banking abstract similar to a du pont analysis this paper divides the changes in returns on assets of us commercial banks for the period from 2000 to 2005 into conventional measures of bank performance the contribution of product mix is significant and offsets losses from technical change and operating efficiency banks respond to changes in the business environment by switching towards more lucrative traditional and nontraditional products large banks are found to benefit more than community banks from the switch to an optimal output portfolio mix including new products spawned by recent financial innovations and deregulation

economic cost scale efficiency and competitive viability in banking this paper addresses the issue of the competitive viability of banks of different scales and scopes of operation and the implications that this may have for the evolving structure of the banking and financial services industry unlike previous papers this paper is the first to include both production and opportunity costs in an empirical evaluation of bank efficiency no consistent evidence is reported to suggest that banking organizations can achieve further gains in either production or economic efficiency by expanding beyond 2 billion dollars of total assets thus it is likely that smaller less diversified banking organizations will remain competitively viable copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

diversification strategies and scope economies evidence from a sample of italian regional bus transport providers a growing number of local public transport lpt companies diversify their production lines by providing a large set of services we investigate the cost structure of a sample of lpt companies operating in italy and assess the presence and the magnitude of scope economies we split the whole sample of firms according to their diversification strategy private firms mainly diversifying in competitive transport related services and public firms providing nontransport services in regulated markets scope economies appear sizeable for both groups but higher for firms pursuing a transport related strategy suggesting caution in the multiutility development pursued by public lpt firms in italy

big bank mergers in europe an analysis of the cost implications this paper examines the cost implications from hypothetical cross border bank mergers in the eu in light of recent claims that substantial cost savings could be expected as the result of the eu s single market programme for financial services in fact our results suggest only limited opportunities for costs saving from big bank mergers and indicate that such mergers are more likely to result in an increase in total costs while there is a large variation in the simulated cost outcomes the greatest opportunities for cost savings would appear to be generated by mergers between german and italian banks in contrast mergers between french and german banks appear likely to result in substantial cost increases although the overall findings suggest limited benefits from cross border mergers between large banks this may be a reflection of the methodology merger simulations are carried out hypothetically ignoring any prior information about the pairings we assume no premiums or merger costs and no further synergies resulting from such things as branch closures or a restructuring of the product mix these assumptions may cause us to understate the potential reduction in total costs resulting from large bank mergers and therefore our estimates provide the most pessimistic of total cost reduction outcomes in conclusion the substantial variation of cost outcomes generated suggests that large banks seeking economies through cross border mergers should select potential partners with great care

the dominance of inefficiencies over scale and product mix economies in banking abstract this study measures and analyzes inefficiencies for all u s banks in 1984 inefficiencies are measured relative to a thick frontier cost function and are found to dominate measured scale and product mix economies most inefficiencies are operational in nature involving the overuse of physical inputs rather than financial involving overpayment of interest also technical inefficiencies proportionate overuse of all inputs dominate allocative inefficiencies improper mix of inputs these results suggest that competitive pressures in banking from deregulation will be focused primarily on banks that do not control costs rather than on those of a particular size or product mix

economies of scope of lending and mobilizing deposits in microfinance institutions a semiparametric analysis microfinance emerged as an innovation in lending to the rural poor in asia and in response to frequent failure of previous interventions in rural financial markets such as directed and subsidized production credit disbursed by agricultural development banks while it started as a collection of banking practices built around providing small loans typically without collateral and accepting tiny savings deposits armendariz de aghion and morduch 2005 p 1 today many microfinance institutions mfis expand their services and strive to offer payment and savings facilities insurance housing and longer term loans to marginalized clientele in rural and urban settings estimates show that there are at least 10 000 microfinance programs worldwide two related and important trends are now emerging the first is toward commercialization which essentially is transforming ngo mfis into regulated intermediaries with the intent to lower costs by accessing deposits as well as strengthen the organizations by privatization the second trend is a renewed interest in experimentation to mobilize savings with emphasis on rural savings economies of scope imply that expansion into the savings market can be more cost efficient if done by the same mfis which makes it a significant factor in assessing the feasibility of these innovations however there are few studies that estimate the magnitude and sign of scope economies in this paper we present some preliminary evidence on scope economies using a large sample of mfis

modelling cost structure the bell system revisited this paper analyses a recent public policy decision and the crucial role played by the choice of the functional form the break up of the bell system is indeed a classic case of anti trust settlement and constitutes one of the most prominent and controversial applications of microeconomics to public policy it is argued that demanding multi output cost properties such as economies of scope for this is the considerable robustness problem displayed by the tranlog cost functional form the reason for this is the considerable able to robustness problem displayed by the translog cost function which is the source underlying many of the expert disagreements it is suggested that the non robustness is due to what ils termed the flip flop property and it is shown that the available empirical evidence from the pre divestiture bell system supports this argument to obtain robust results we propose that the analysis is constrained to the proper region of the cost function we propose that the analysis is con

scale and scope economies in the multi product banking firm abstract the multi product nature of the banking firm is examined utilizing the translog cost function this analysis indicates that contrary to conventional wisdom natural monopoly scale economies and product specific decreasing costs are not robust characterizations of the banking industry there is however evidence that the cost function is characterized by economies of scope the implications of these results are discussed and extensions of this approach suggested

central place theory and city size distribution this paper proposes a theory of city size distribution via a hierarchy approach rather than the popular random growth process it does so by formalizing central place theory using an equilibrium entry model and specifying the conditions under which city size distribution follows a power law central place theory describes the way in which a hierarchical city system with difierent layers of cities serving difierently sized market areas is formed from a uniformly populated space the force driving the city size difierences in this model is the heterogeneity in economies of scale across goods the city size distribution under a central place hierarchy exhibits a power law if the distribution of scale economies is regularly varying which is a general class that encompasses many well known commonly used distributions this model is also consistent with a power law for flrms and a number average size rule which is the log linear relationship between the number and average size of the cities in which an industry is located

the role of fixed costs and cost complementarities in determining scope economies and the cost of narrow banking proposals narrow banking proposals would separate insured deposits from most types of bank lending using data from large u s banks the authors examine the extent to which narrow banking proposals are likely to result in increased production costs production costs will rise for nonjoint provision of deposit and loan services if there are cost complementarities in producing the two outputs jointly or if joint production enables banks to spread their fixed costs more effectively unlike standard cost function approaches the authors methods allow them to estimate the fixed cost and cost complementarity effects separately they find the net production cost consequences of narrow banking to be negligible copyright 1993 by university of chicago press

x efficiency in banking looking beyond the balance sheet the distribution free and stochastic frontier estimation methods are used to derive bank specific measures of cost and profit xefficiency this is done to investigate the importance of including aggregate measures of off balance sheet obs activities the results indicate that economic cost and production cost x efficiency estimates increase with the inclusion of the obs measure profit xefficiency estimates are largely unaffected further the composition of bankso obs activities appears to help explain interbank differences in cost and profit x efficiency estimates whereas bank size and the mix between on and off balance sheet banking activities are largely uncorrelated with the x efficiency estimates

gibrat s law for all cities two empirical regularities concerning the size distribution of cities have repeatedly been established zipf s law holds the upper tail is pareto and city growth is proportionate census 2000 data are used covering the entire size distribution not just the upper tail the nontruncated distribution is shown to be lognormal rather than pareto this provides a simple justification for the coexistence of proportionate growth and the resulting lognormal distribution an equilibrium theory of local externalities that can explain the empirical size distribution of cities is proposed the driving force is a random productivity process of local economies and the perfect mobility of workers

an economic theory of central places is not really a theory of spatial economic behaviour instead it is a series of brilliant conjectures about the locational configurations that will result from such behaviour the brilliance of these conjectures is illustrated by the successful applications of the theory to such diverse phenomena as the locational patterns of retailing activity in cities and of service centres in rural areas the size distribution of cities and the diffusion of information and diseases in this paper we outline an economic model of central places 2 our theorising has two distinct purposes first we wish to begin the development of a theory of central places that is based on maximising behaviour of economic agents any theory of economic behaviour from which central places can be derived is necessarily both difficult and cumbersome non convexities in the activities of buying and selling drive the model and thus non differentiabilities and discontinuities abound as one seeks more generality in such circumstances difficulties multiply rapidly in order to begin the job we have used assumptions that are specific and sometimes even crude the second purpose of our theorising is to illustrate the limitations of current central place theory by providing counter examples to some propositions commonly accepted to follow from it for this purpose we need not worry about lack of generality in any of our counter examples of course we are not solely concerned to refute accepted generalisations by doing so we hope to make alternative possibilities apparent what we hope to attain therefore is a theoretical development inspired by the extremely fruitful conjectures of existing central place theory

potential cost synergies from banks acquiring real estate brokerage services abstract national banks and financial holding companies fhc solicited permission from the federal reserve board and the treasury department to add real estate brokerage and management services to list of permissible business activities under the 1999 gramm leach bliley act glb to date permission has been denied due to the community choice in real estate act hr 111 and s 98 this study offers a method of combining the financial data of two independent industries additionally this study identifies the scale returns and cost complementarities that may occur if banks offered real estate brokerage services under a single organization considerable evidence suggests that joining bank and real estate activities under a single organization would continue to generate increasing returns to scale for banks even when large levels of real estate brokerage services are offered by the joint institution in addition the results indicate evidence that bank acquisitions of real estate brokerages do create some cost saving synergies from cost complementarities between product lines finally complementarities exist between traditional bank services and real estate services most at low levels of real estate outputs

money as meta rule buchanan s constitutional economics as a foundation for monetary stability this paper explores james buchanan s contributions to monetary economics and argues these contributions form the foundation of a robust monetary economics paradigm while often not recognized for his contributions to monetary economics buchanan s scholarship offers important insights for current debates especially the renewed interest in narrow banking in the wake of the financial crisis we argue that the post 2007 crisis milieu creates a unique opportunity to recognize as buchanan did the vital role that money plays in the market as the grammar of commerce that recognition makes the need for more fundamental reform of our monetary regimes at the constitutional level more apparent making buchanan s work on monetary constitutions more relevant than ever before we then discuss how adopting buchanan s monetary framework can improve both monetary scholarship and institutions

a multiproduct cost study of savings and loans this paper investigates the cost structure of savings and loans most studies of financial institutions have failed to take into account the multiproduct nature of these institutions using the multiproduct approach the existence of subadditivity multiproduct global and product specific economies of scale and scope and substitutability between inputs is investigated a translogarithmic cost function is estimated using 1982 data on california savings and loans restrictive functional forms also estimated are rejected standard errors for the statistics calculated are estimated and various statistical tests are conducted previous authors have not calculated standard errors for these statistics no evidence of subadditivity in the industry is found in order to investigate the impact of deregulation on the financial services industry it is necessary to know the cost structure of the industry optimal firm size and product mix can be determined once the structure is known the presence of scale economies would imply that smaller firms or entering firms that operate at a small scale would be at a cost disadvantage compared with larger established firms a finding of economies of scope i e economies of joint production would imply that firms that were specialized would be at a cost disadvantage and that regulations that restrict the outputs a firm is allowed to produce may lead to inefficient production

do consumers pay for one stop banking evidence from an alternative revenue function abstract in providing financial services jointly banks may reduce costs due to complementarities in production cost economies of scope or raise revenues from complementarities in consumption revenue economies of scope cost economies of scope between bank deposits and loans have been found to be small revenue economies of scope are investigated here for the first time and found to be insignificant over 1978 1990 for both small and large banks and for those on or off the revenue efficient frontier the lack of complementarities between deposits and loans where benefits are most likely to occur suggests that claims of important synergies from an expansion of banking powers be taken with caution

an empirical study of joint production and scale economies in commercial banking this paper utilizes the translog cost function to test the proposition that the bank productionfunction is characterized by jointness the cross section analysis for the years 1973 through 1978 indicates that bank production is in fact characterized by jointness this result calls into question the findings and implications of studies that utilize the assumption of non jointness in production since virtually all of the major bank cost studies employ the assumption of nonjointness the second part of our analysis examines scale economies for the banking firm while allowing for jointness in production our estimates indicate that scale economies characterize bank production at only small bank sizes and that the cost structure of large banks is characterized by diseconomies of scale

the area and population of cities new insights from a different perspective on cities the distribution of city populations has attracted much attention in part because it constrains models of local growth however there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail because available data need to rely on legal rather than economic definitions for medium and small cities to remedy this difficulty we construct cities from the bottom up by clustering populated areas obtained from high resolution data we find that zipf s law for population holds for cities as small as 5 000 inhabitants in great britain and 12 000 inhabitants in the us we also find a zipf s law for areas jel r11 r12 r23

zipf s law for cities an explanation zipf s law is a very tight constraint on the class of admissible models of local growth it says that for most countries the size distribution of cities strikingly fits a power law the number of cities with populations greater than s is proportional to 1 s suppose that at least in the upper tail all cities follow some proportional growth process this appears to be verified empirically this automatically leads their distribution to converge to zipf s law

changes in the cost of intermediation the case of savings and loans the minimum cost output configuration for a firm may change as the result of a variety of factors including changes in market structure in this paper we test this structural change hypothesis with savings and loan data we find support for the hypothesis that separable constant returns to scale production functions characterize the average savings and loan in our sample in 1983 this is in contrast to the cost complementarities found in 1978 we argue that this result may be the result of regulatory changes that allowed savings and loans to alter their production mix to fully capture the benefits of joint production it seems reasonable to assume that the cost minimizing configuration of a multiproduct firm is potentially subject to nonstationarity during periods of structural change in input and or output markets the late 1970s and early 1980s represent such a period of turbulence for many markets in the financial services industry volatile interest rates combined with technological and regulatory changes may have caused firms in this industry to alter their output mixes in an effort to capture cost complementarities from joint production the purpose of this paper is to test this hypothesis of structural change in the savings and loan industry using both a translog and minflex laurent translog mlt specification of the production function we have chosen to investigate savings and loans s ls during the late 1970s and early 1980s for two reasons first s ls provide an ideal vehicle for testing our hypothesis because they were restricted almost exclusively to mortgages and securities as outputs before the passage of the depository institutions deregulation and monetary control act of 1980 and the garn st germain act of 1982 moreover there were also market changes with respect to both the pricing and mix of inputs i e deposits our second rationale involves the fact that there is a large and growing body of literature in the area of what is now called the

imf lending programs participation and impact abstract participation in imf programs has been an option that more and more developing countries have exercised in recent years in this paper a detailed analysis of such participation over the period 1976 1986 provides a number of insights into the motivations for and the macroeconomic effects of such participation participation is driven by a combination of past performance present external influences and sluggish adjustment of developing countries the ability to predict which countries will participate in the imf program is quite good with nearly 90 percent of variation in such choices accounted for by the explanatory variables employed increased participation has as contemporaneous effects a reduction in economic growth and domestic investment and an improvement in the current account lagged effects of increased participation on economic growth and domestic investment are positive and in most estimates quantitatively greater than the contemporaneous effects there is also evidence of significantly lower public investment an increased budget surplus and real depreciation of the exchange rate with increased participation results for domestic credit creation and government current expenditure although they have a sign consistent with more austere policy cannot be shown to be significantly different from those not participating

nontraditional activities and the efficiency of us commercial banks abstract in recent years an increasing portion of bank income has been generated through nontraditional activities most studies of bank efficiency do not include any measure of nontraditional activities when measuring outputs in this paper cost revenue and profit efficiency are estimated by using models with and without nontraditional output the results suggest that the standard model which omits nontraditional output understates bank efficiency evidence also surfaces that based on efficiency the relative ranking of individual banks changes when nontraditional activities are included as a type of output

a composite cost function for multiproduct firms with an application to economies of scope in banking the composite cost function the authors propose combines a quadratic output structure with a log quadratic input price structure and is well suited for examining economies of scope subadditivity and other important properties of multiproduct firms to compare the composite model with an appropriate set of alternative functional forms they develop a parsimonious but general specification that nests the standard translog cost function the generalized translog cost function a separable quadratic cost function and the composite cost function an application to economies of scope in banking confirms the advantages of the composite model copyright 1992 by mit press

efficiency in the savings and loan industry abstract the stochastic econometric cost frontier approach is modified to investigate efficiency in mutual and stock s ls using 1991 data on u s s ls this methodology allows both the cost frontier and error structures to differ between s ls of these two ownership forms a likelihood ratio test indicates that the data support this unrestricted model which implies efficient mutual and stock s ls use different production technologies various measures of inefficiency show that on average stock s ls are less efficient than mutual s ls the second part of the article relates the inefficiency measures to several correlates

returns to scale and input substitution for large u s banks the united states commercial banking industry has experienced significant changes in recent years the recent wave of mergers and the near term prospects of interstate banking suggests that the industry is moving toward much larger average banking organizations rhoades 1985 will a more concentrated banking industry result in lower costs due to scale economies we address this question by examining the cost function for large banks numerous studies of economies of scale in banking exist generally tracing their roots to the classic papers by benston 1965 and bell and murphy 1968 a good review of the most recent studies can be found in clark 1988 the majority of the papers uses samples of smaller banks that is under 1 billion in deposits finding generally that economies of scale are quickly exhausted and that further increases in bank size occur at constant or possibly increasing cost the extrapolation of previous findings for samples of smaller banks to large banks may be problematic especially in the current environment first large banks service a different mix of markets and customers than small banks suggesting that large and small banks probably face different cost structures second the process of deregulation may have rendered the results of prior studies moot since the data pertain to periods before significant deregulation since we

dea ar profit ratios and sensitivity of 100 large u s banks abstract several important dea ar concepts were applied here to banking for the first time this application includes classification sensitivity uniqueness linked cones lcs and profit ratios notably large bank behavior seems to be explained better by profit ratios than by relative efficiency measures of dea efficiency ar efficiency and lc profit ratios were made for a bank panel of the u s s 100 largest banks in asset size from 1986 to 1991 high levels of inefficiency were found as in previous studies classification of the dea efficiency measures identified the inefficient dmus with some positive primal slacks sensitivity analysis of the dea efficiency measures showed that the extreme efficient classification was generally relatively insensitive to errors in the data the ars eliminated i 44 to 60 of the dea extreme efficient dmus and ii all of the banks with unprofitable actual profit ratios some statistical analyses highlight the superiority of the lc profit ratios relative to the ar efficiency measures

economies of scale and economies of scope in multiproduct financial institutions further evidence from credit unions recently murray and white 1983 have analyzed economies of scale economies of production due to output expansion and economies of scope economies due to joint production of output for credit unions of british columbia by explicitly recognizing the multiproduct nature of the credit union unfortunately their analysis of scale and scope economies is limited in view of recent advances in the theory of the multiproduct firm for example in multiproduct firms there exist two economies of scale economies arising from overall production activity and economies arising from the production of a particular product or a product set estimates of scale economies obtained by murray and white hereafter mw are overall scale economies but no discussion of product specific scale economies is provided in their analysis further mw employ the cost complementarity concept as a measure of economies of scope however cost complementarity is a local not global test for the existence of economies of scope in addition it is necessary to distinguish overall scope economies from product specific scope economies this paper reexamines the issue of economies of scale and scope in credit unions extending the model developed by mw and providing some new empirical evidence section 1 extends the model developed by mw to reexamine the issue of scale and scope in multiproduct credit unions section 2 contains a description of empirical results section 3 completes the paper with a conclusion

branching restrictions and banking costs abstract previous research of banking costs has been limited by the choice of the functional form irregularities in the estimated cost functions and a failure to rigorously examine the difference between banks in branching states and banks in unit banking states this paper addresses these shortcomings banks are modelled as three input three output cost minimizing firms a three equation system is estimated using 1985 functional cost analysis data the findings indicate that banks in unit banking states experience diseconomies of scale banks in branching states experience diseconomies of scale at the bank level but economies of scale at the branch level we also find evidence of economies of scope for branch state banks but not for unit state banks

an identity crisis examining imf financial programming summary the imf uses its well known financial programming model to derive monetary and fiscal programs to achieve the desired macroeconomic targets in countries undergoing crises or receiving debt relief this paper considers under what conditions financial programming would work best and then tests those conditions in the data the key restrictions of financial programming are assumptions about exogeneity of some components of identities with respect to others and the assumption of stable and reasonable parameters for some very simple behavioral relationships in at least the literal applications of the framework financial programming does not do well in forecasting the target variables even when some components of the identity are known with certainty

equities of scope as merger incentives under capital regulation narrow versus synergy banking valuation abstractthe call options theory of corporate security valuation is applied to narrow banking contingent claims of one bank while the cap options theory is applied to synergy banking contingent claims of another bank this article investigates efficiency gains specified as equities of scope associated with the likelihood of the two banks involved in merger under capital regulation we find that merger incentives are encouraged when the narrowing banking is conducted by the consolidated bank whereas discouraged when the synergy banking is conducted raising bank capital requirement leads to an increased interest margin of the consolidated bank with the narrow banking valuation however to a decreased margin of the consolidated bank with the synergy banking valuation an increase in the capital regulation reduces the merger incentives in the narrow banking valuation whereas increases the merger disincentive in the synergy banking valuation these findings are consistent with the organizational theory that

stock exchange business models and their operative performance abstract in recent years stock exchanges have been increasingly diversifying their operations into related business areas such as derivatives trading post trading services and software sales this trend can be observed most notably among profit oriented trading venues while the pursuit for diversification is likely to be driven by the attractiveness of these investment opportunities it is yet an open question whether certain integration activities are also efficient both from a social welfare and from the exchanges perspective academic contributions so far analyzed different business models primarily from the former perspective whereas there is only little literature considering their impact on the exchange itself by employing a panel data set of 28 stock exchanges for the years 1999 2003 we seek to shed light on this topic by comparing the technical efficiency and factor productivity of exchanges with different business models our findings suggest that exchanges that diversify into related activities are mostly less efficient than exchanges that remain focused on the cash market in particular we find no evidence that vertically integrated exchanges are more efficient however they seem to possess a substantially stronger factor productivity growth than other business models we presume that integration activity comes at the cost of increased operational complexity which outweigh potential synergies between related activities and therefore leads to technical inefficiencies our findings contribute to the ongoing discussion about the drawbacks and merits of vertical integration

evaluating the effect of imf lending to low income countries the purpose of this paper is twofold to apply to a group of low income borrowers from the imf the most commonly used technique for measuring the independent effects on economic developments of imf support and to develop a minimum set of diagnostic tests for determining whether necessary conditions for using the methodology exist the modified control group methodology is used to measure the effect of imf support on three key variables output growth inflation and the external debt rservice ratio the sample comprises adjustment programs begun during 1986 1991 supported by the imf s enhanced structural adjustment facility esaf the distinguishing feature of the modified control group approach is the estimation of a policy counterfactual policies that would have been followed in the absence of imf support against which to compare actual policies and resulting outcomes using this approach for the esaf the sample reveals statistically significant beneficial effects of imf support on output growth and the debtrservice ratio but no effects on inflation diagnostic tests of these results rarely if ever reported in the literature are shown to be critical in interpreting the validity of the results of assessments of adjustment lending for this sample at least the diagnostic tests cast doubt on the reliability of estimates of the effects of imf supported programs using panel data in a modified control group model the most obvious and manageable modifications to the

scale economies scope economies and technical change in federal reserve payment processing in the past decade the u s economy has witnessed a tremendous surge in the usage of electronic payment processing services and an increased importance of the firms that provide these services in this paper we estimate scale economies scope economies and technical change in the federal reserve s provision of payments processing from 1990 to 2000 we find considerable scale economies and evidence of some scope economies for the provision of automated clearinghouse fedwire and book entry services no matter whether we specify a separable quadratic or a translog cost function in addition we find that disembodied technical change also contributed to the overall reduction in costs throughout the 1990s

choosing among alternative cost function specifications an application to italian multi utilities abstract the paper investigates the cost properties of a sample of italian utilities providing in combination gas water and electricity services the estimates from a multi product composite cost function rev econ stat 74 1992 221 are compared with the ones coming from other traditional functional forms such as the standard translog st the generalized translog gt and the separable quadratic sq the results show that the composite model provides a better description of data and highlight the presence of global scope and scale economies for the median firm of the sample

competition of firms discriminatory pricing and location1 two costlessly mobile firms are to be located in a market region a subset of the plane the firms compete by setting locations and delivered price schedules to study this competitive stiuation an appropriate extensive form game is defined along with an appropri ate noncooperative solution concept existence and general properties of the equilibrium are demonstrated among the results are each firm increases its profit by locating so as to decrease total cost to both firms of serving the market firms will never locate coinciden tally if they have identical production costs and transport cost rates or if these are different and the firms are located in a circular market region having a uniform demand distribution this paper studies competition between two profit maximizing firms in space who are costlessly mobile and may discriminate in price we will allow the firms to set locations and delivered price schedules and we will be concerned with the existence and properties of equilibria in location and price starting with hotelling 9 the spatial competition literature has focused on location on bounded linear markets by two or more firms hotelling assumed identical firms that produced a single good with constant cost of production and considered consumers to be uniformly distributed and to have inelastic demand he also assumed that the consumers pay transport cost and purchase the good from the cheapest source hotelling claimed that a nash equilibrium in locations for the two firm market existed and yielded back to back locations at the center of the market many authors most recently d aspremont gabszewicz and thisse 2 have noted that an equilbrium in prices and location does not exist for hotelling s model however if the firms employ identical exogeneously specified prices hotelling s conclusions hold subsequent work by smithies 14 hartwick and hartwick 7 and eaton 3 claimed to show that a nash equi librium in f o b prices and locations can exist in markets with a uniform distribu tion of consumers each of whom have identical elastic demand functions for the two and three firm problems the work of d aspremont et al casts doubt on these conclusions without the adoption of restrictive conditions our work contrasts with these works and related research which has dealt with linear markets with uniform distributions of customers and with identical firms our work will involve markets that are subsets of the plane having nonuniform distributions of customers our firms will be allowed to be different that is have differences in production and transport costs however the fundamental difference in our approach is that our firms will set discriminatory prices and not price f o b in many ways our work will represent the discriminatory pricing