financial deregulation and productivity growth in banking sector empirical evidence from bangladesh this article examines the effects of regulatory reform on productivity growth in the bangladesh banking industry we use a unique balanced panel dataset comprising bank level annual data from the e

the demand for spatially complementary national parks using a panel dataset on annual visits to each u s national park we empirically analyze the demand for these parks using a spatial lag model which accounts for the complementary nature of the parks our results suggest that increases in fuel costs temperature increases of greater than 3 f and restrictions on foreign tourism all lower visitation to u s national parks causing associated decreases in money spent by tourists jobs created and income generated these results can also be used to analyze the possible implications of proposed public policies such as international visa requirements gas taxes and carbon taxing trading

sensitivity analysis of efficiency and malmquist productivity indices an application to spanish savings banks abstract hypothesis testing and statistical precision in the context of non parametric efficiency and productivity measurement have been investigated since the early 1990s recent contributions focus on this matter through the use of resampling methods i e bootstrapping techniques however empirical evidence is still practically non existent this gap is more noticeable in the case of banking efficiency studies where the literature is immense in this work we explore productivity growth and productive efficiency for spanish savings banks over the initial post deregulation period 1992 1998 using data envelopment analysis dea and bootstrapping techniques results show that productivity growth has occurred mainly due to improvement in production possibilities and that mean efficiency has remained fairly constant over time the bootstrap analysis yields further evidence as for many firms productivity growth or decline is not statistically significant with regard to efficiency measurement the bootstrap reveals that the disparities in the original efficiency scores of some firms are lessened to a great extent

fuel taxes an important instrument for climate policy abstract this article shows that fuel taxes serve a very important role for the environment and that we risk a backlash of increased emissions if they are abolished fuel taxes have restrained growth in fuel demand and associated carbon emissions although fuel demand is large and growing our analysis shows that it would have been much higher in the absence of domestic fuel taxes people often assert that fuel demand is inelastic but there is strong research evidence showing the opposite the price elasticity is in fact quite high but only in the long run in the short run it may be quite inelastic which has important implications for policy makers had europe not followed a policy of high fuel taxation but had low us taxes then fuel demand would have been twice as large hypothetical transport demand in the whole oecd area is calculated for various tax scenarios and the results show that fuel taxes are the single most powerful climate policy instrument implemented to date yet this fact is not usually given due attention in the debate

the evolution of cost productivity and efficiency among us credit unions abstract advances in information processing technology have eroded the advantages of small scale and proximity to customers that traditionally enabled small lenders to thrive nonetheless the membership and market share of us credit unions have increased though their average size has also risen we investigate changes in the efficiency and productivity of us credit unions during 1989 2006 by benchmarking the performance of individual firms against an estimated order quantile lying near the efficient frontier we construct a cost analog of the malmquist productivity index which we decompose to estimate changes in cost and scale efficiency and changes in technology we find that cost productivity fell on average across all credit unions but especially among smaller credit unions smaller credit unions confronted a shift in technology that increased the minimum cost required to produce given amounts of output all but the largest credit unions also became less scale efficient over time

efficiency of american states after implementation of the patient protection and affordable care act ppaca from 2014 to 2017 abstractwe assess the impact of healthcare efficiency among u s states after implementation of the ppaca a malmquist index decomposes productivity changes of state healthcare systems since 2014

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

the effects of transport regulation on the oil market does market power matter instruments used to regulate the consumption of oil in the transport sector include fuel taxes biofuel requirements and fuel efficiency standards however the effects that these have on oil consumption and price vary if market power is present in the oil market the directions of change in consumption and price might contrast with those in a competitive market as a result the market structure affects not only the effectiveness of the policy instruments used to reduce oil consumption but also the terms of trade and carbon leakage in particular reduced oil consumption as a result of increased fuel efficiency standards will unambiguously increase the price of oil under a monopoly

short run fuel price responses at the pump and on the road abstract we provide evidence that motorists respond to short run fluctuations in fuel prices at the gas pump and not on the road employing variants of censored panel regression to control for censoring of the dependent variable we find that the fuel price has a negative impact on the quantity of fuel purchased but no consistently significant impact on the subsequent distance driven until the next refill over the short run drivers thus appear to cope with high fuel prices by adjusting fuel purchases with each visit to the filling station but without altering their daily mileage

productivity growth in large us commercial banks the initial post deregulation experience abstract we explore productivity growth for a group of 201 large us commercial banks over the initial post deregulation period from 1984 to 1990 using data envelopment analysis dea we measure productivity growth using malmquist productivity indexes and isolate the contributions of technical change technical efficiency change and scale change to productivity growth we find overall productivity growth at the rate of about 4 5 per year on average but productivity declined by 7 61 between 1984 and 1985 and by 0 33 between 1988 and 1989 our second stage panel regressions reveal that larger asset size and specialization of product mix associate with higher productivity growth while higher equity to assets associates with lower productivity growth

corruption soundness of the banking sector and economic growth a cross country study abstract this paper explores the impact of corruption on both the banking sector and economic growth we determine the impact using 76 macroeconomic data from various countries over the period 2002 2004 the results of various cross sectional regressions provide substantial evidence that corruption significantly aggravates the problems with bad loans in the banking sector in this study we also find some evidence of a new channel through which corruption lowers economic growth corruption distorts the allocation of bank funds from normal projects to bad projects which decreases the quality of private investments hence it decreases economic growth

the rebound effect microeconomic definitions limitations and extensions abstract the rebound effect results in part from an increased consumption of energy services following an improvement in the technical efficiency of delivering those services this increased consumption offsets the energy savings that may otherwise be achieved if the rebound effect is sufficiently large it may undermine the rationale for policy measures to encourage energy efficiency the nature and magnitude of the rebound effect is the focus of long running dispute with energy economics this paper brings together previous theoretical work to provide a rigorous definition of the rebound effect to clarify key conceptual issues and to highlight the potential consequences of various assumptions for empirical estimates of the effect the focus is on the direct rebound effect for a single energy service indirect and economy wide rebound effects are not discussed beginning with khazzoom s original definition of the rebound effect we expose the limitations of three simplifying assumptions on which this definition is based first we argue that capital costs form an important part of the total cost of providing energy services and that empirical studies that estimate rebound effects from variations in energy prices are prone to bias second we argue that energy efficiency should be treated as an endogenous variable and that empirical estimates of the rebound effect may need to apply a simultaneous equation model to capture the joint determination of key variables third we explore the implications of the opportunity costs of time in the production of energy services and highlight the consequences for energy use of improved time efficiency the influence of time costs on the rebound effect and the existence of a parallel rebound effect with respect to time each of these considerations serves to highlight the difficulties in obtaining reliable estimates of the rebound effect and the different factors that need to be controlled for we discuss the implications of these findings for econometric studies and argue that several existing studies may overestimate the magnitude of the effect

the decomposition of total factor co2 emission efficiency of 97 contracting countries in paris agreement abstract greenhouse gas reduction requires joint efforts from the global society while improving co2 emission efficiency is a centrally important means to realize emission reduction targets therefore it is of strategic importance to identify main influential factors to co2 emission efficiency of different countries by considering the technology heterogeneity the originality herein lies in that applying the modified decomposition method of metafrontier malmquist luenberger index mml to define the priority of contracting countries in paris agreement to improve emission efficiency in this study 97 contracting countries of paris agreement are divided into 4 groups according to levels of income low income countries lower middle income countries upper middle income countries and high income countries and studied with their input and output data during 1990 2014 as samples the empirical results reveal that the paths for the contracting countries of paris agreement to improve the efficiency are different first lower middle income group can be facilitated through increasing factor input to increase the mml index considering the highest increase in scale efficiency 2 78 second low income group should eliminate the excessive concentration of inputs by enhancing the energy management efficiency third in terms of the significant advancement of high income group s mml index brought by technology advancement and the abnormal drop of brunei darussalam s mml related to technology decay this analysis emphasized that the advancement and innovation of energy technology are the main force for total factor co2 emission efficiency improvement

efficiency productivity gains and the size of brazilian supermarkets abstract the supermarket sector is an important segment of the brazilian economy in recent years the role of large retailers and market globalization has transformed this sector in one of the most competitive in the country this paper aims to evaluate the technical efficiency and scale of the brazilian supermarket sector through bootstrap data envelopment analysis and to measure changes in productivity from 2005 to 2012 applying the bootstrapped malmquist index a second stage analysis is performed to explain efficiency levels and productivity gains in terms of supermarket chains characteristics we found that the brazilian supermarket chains have low average efficiency levels and in general there was an increase in productivity in the period the consolidations that took place in this sector can be explained in terms of scales of operation small supermarket chains had lower efficiency levels both in 2005 and 2012 but experienced higher levels of productivity growth in the period results of second stage analysis shows that some supermarket chains characteristics are correlated to productivity gains

technological progress and sustainable development what about the rebound effect abstract sustainability concepts that rest on the idea of resource or energy efficiency improvements due to technological progress tend to overestimate the potential saving effects because they frequently ignore the behavioral responses evoked by technological improvements efficiency improvements also affect the demand for resources and energy and often an increase in efficiency by 1 will cause a reduction in resource use that is far below 1 or sometimes it can even cause an increase in resource use this phenomenon is commonly labeled the rebound effect which is well known among energy economists but never attracted much attention in ecological economics the paper starts with the traditional neoclassical analysis of the rebound effect in a partial equilibrium framework that concentrates on the demand of one particular energy service such as mobility or room temperature it also provides an overview of some of the main empirical studies based on this model that mostly confirm the existence of the rebound effect but are controversial about its actual importance however we have to go beyond the neoclassical single service model in order to take care of the variety of possible feedback affecting energy use the paper presents two important expansions of the single service model in order to show the potential relevance of the rebound effect to ecological economics first it is shown that in a multi services model it proves to be difficult to make general statements about the relevance of the rebound effect in this case the overall effect of an increase in energy efficiency on total energy use depends on the on the assumptions about the substitutability between the services considered and the direction of the income effect second the paper also tries to take care of the fact that changes in resource use or energy use are frequently just side effects of other forms of technological progress especially technological change of a time saving nature can have a large influence on energy use as many time saving devices for example faster modes of transport require an increase in energy consumption that is frequently reinforced by a rebound effect with respect to time this effect will be especially strong when wages are high and at the same time energy prices are low as is currently the case in most industrialized countries consequently the paper also provides a strong argument for the introduction of energy taxes

deregulation intensity of competition industry evolution and the productivity growth of u s commercial banks we study the influence of the evolution in intrastate and interstate deregulations on the total factor productivity growth of u s commercial banking during 1971 95 we consider statewide deregulations in intrastate branching intrastate multibank holding company mbhc interstate multibank holding company and interstate mbhc de novo branching regulations results indicate that 1 long standing banking restrictions negatively affected banks productivity growth and 2 relaxing restrictions on intrastate branching expansion had a positive long run influence upon banks productivity growth the effect of interstate mbhc deregulations is largely short run and it is negative in the long run for interstate mbhc de novo branching deregulations

technical change organizational form and the structure of bank production of those technological characteristics related to the nature of competition among firms in an industry or market scale economies and technical change are especially important economies of scale are said to exist when an equiproportional increase in all inputs results in a greater than proportional increase in output or equivalently when an increase in output at constant input prices leads to a less than proportional increase in total costs thus average costs decline as output expands depending upon the extent to which costs decline as output increases regulation of the firms in the industry may be necessary l the literature analyzing scale economies in commercial banking is voluminous the early studies on scale economies in banking include those by benston 1965 1972 greenbaum 1967 murphy 1972 and bell and murphy 1968 more recent studies include those by benston hanweck and humphrey 1982 and clark 1984 2 this literature has established that mild scale economies exist in bank

introduction to the special issue things we do and don t understand about the household and the environment environmental economics has been slow to incorporate the full and complex nature of the household into its analytical structures and to reflect empirical evidence on household decision making this paper provides an overview of some of the main unanswered questions

technical scale and allocative efficiencies in u s banking an empirical investigation a nonparametric frontier approach is used to calculate the overall technical pure technical allocative and scale efficiencies for a sample of 322 independent banks the sample was drawn from the federal deposit insurance corporation tapes on the reports of condition and reports of income call reports for the year 1986 the results indicated a low level of overall efficiency the main source of inefficiency was technical in nature rather than allocative separate efficiency frontiers were constructed to test the effect of branching however the distributions of efficiency measures for branching and non branching banks were not found to be different

raising taxes through equalization a simple theory suggests that a common form of federal horizontal equalization grants should cause subnational governments to levy higher tax rates distorting local tax bases and so increasing federal transfers to test this i examine canadian provincial tax policies in the 1972 2002 period consistent with the theory provinces respond to expansions of equalization transfers by increasing their own tax rates i estimate that on average tax rates in grant receiving provinces were substantially and significantly higher as a consequence of the transfer formula jel classification h21 une theorie simple suggere qu une forme usuelle d octrois federaux de perequation horizontale devrait entrainer les gouvernements sub nationaux a imposer de plus hauts taux d imposition modifiant ainsi les bases de fiscalite locale et ce faisant accroissant les transferts federaux pour mettre au test cette hypothese on examine les politiques fiscales des provinces canadiennes pour la periode entre 1972 et 2002 d une maniere qui semble supporter l hypothese les provinces ont repondu a un accroissement des transferts de perequation en accroissant leur propre taux d imposition on estime que les taux moyens d imposition dans les provinces qui recoivent des transferts sont plus eleves de maniere substantielle et significative en raison de la formule de transferts

a parallel production frontiers approach for intertemporal efficiency analysis the case of taiwanese commercial banks abstract a comparison of the efficiency of a production unit at one period with those of other units at another period is challenging because the bases for calculating efficiency are usually different the malmquist productivity index mpi is an effective measure that can overcome this difficulty however the existing measures of this index have various weaknesses with regard to feasibility circularity decomposability and consistency this paper thus develops a model to construct parallel production frontiers for the units at different periods to measure the mpi this model is always feasible the calculated mpi has the property of circularity it can be decomposed into the product of efficiency change and technical change and the results are consistent an application of this model to taiwanese commercial banks for the period 2008 2013 confirms these merits the results also indicate that in general the mpis of these banks increased from 2008 to 2013 and this was attributed to improvements in technology since the efficiencies measured from the parallel model are comparable among different units and different periods they can be used for intertemporal analysis to identify the banks with unsatisfactory performance in different periods

the simple economics of motor vehicle pollution a case for fuel tax the volume of pollution produced by an automobile is determined by driver s behavior along three margins i vehicle selection ii kilometers driven and iii on road fuel economy the first two margins have been studied extensively however the third has received scant attention how significant is this intensive margin what would be the optimal policies when it is taken into account the paper develops and analyzes a simple model of the technical and behavioral mechanisms that determine the volume emissions produced by a car the results show that an optimal fuel tax would provide drivers with appropriate incentives along all three margins and that only public information is needed for a fuel tax to be set optimally in contrast an optimal distance tax would require private information lastly relative to the optimal fuel tax a simple uniform fuel tax is shown to be progressive thus being already deployed worldwide a uniform fuel tax is an attractive second best policy these findings should be accounted for when designing new mechanisms to alleviate motor vehicle pollution

mergers and technical efficiency in spanish savings banks a stochastic distance function approach abstract the aim of this paper is to test the temporal variation of technical efficiency of spanish savings banks during the period 1985 1998 furthermore we test whether merged and non merged firms have different levels and temporal patterns of technical efficiency a stochastic output distance function r w shephard theory of cost and production functions princeton university press princeton nj is employed to accommodate multiple output technology the distance function provides the advantage that it does not need information about prices so it can accommodate the multi product nature of the financial sector only using the quantities as data an important point when the assumptions about perfectly competitive markets are unlikely to be met the temporal variation of efficiency is modeled extending the battese and coelli journal of productivity analysis 3 1992 153 169 approach in two ways relaxing the monotonicity of the temporal variation pattern of the efficiency term and allowing for different patterns of efficiency change between merged and non merged firms

technical progress inefficiency and productivity change in u s banking 1984 1993 studies often find that on average u s commercial banks are quite inefficient and the authors find that banks became more technically inefficient between 1984 and 1993 from a new decomposition of the malmquist productivity index into changes in pure technical and scale efficiency as well as both pure technical changes and changes in scale of technology they find that much of the inefficiency increase can be attributed to the general failure of banks to adopt technological improvements made by a few banks that advanced the efficient frontier small banks experienced especially large decreases in both efficiency and productivity

do high oil prices matter evidence on the mobility behavior of german households focusing on travel survey data from germany this paper investigates the determinants of automobile travel with the specific aim of quantifying the effects of fuel prices and fuel economy the analysis is predicated on the notion that car mileage is a two stage decision process comprising the discrete choice of whether to own a car and the continuous choice of distance traveled to capture this process we employ censored regression models consisting of probit and ols estimators which allows us to gauge the extent to which sample selectivity may bias the results our elasticity estimates indicate a significant positive association between increased fuel economy and increased driving and a significantly negative fuel price elasticity which ranges between 35 and 41 taken together these results suggest that fuel taxes are likely to be a more effective policy measure in reducing emissions than fuel efficiency standards

let them eat cake a note on comparing alternative models of the demand for medical care this article comments on the rand econometric approach to estimating and testing models of the demand for medical care as typified in duan et al 1983 the rand methodology is contrasted with more mainstream econometric approaches to similar empirical problems as developed in the sample selection literature it is shown that despite rand s claim their approach requires some fairly unusual assumptions on the model joint error distribution and functional form alternatively their model likelihood functions may be interpreted as being nested in more general sample selection model likelihood functions with easily testable parameter restrictions

public security in brazil efficiency and technological gaps abstract this article analyzes the technical efficiency the total factor productivity tfp and the technological gap in public security services in brazilian states the order m frontier is used for results estimation the tfp variation is built by decomposing the malmquist productivity index into technical efficiency scale efficiency and technological variation more than 50 of the federative units were considered technically inefficient out of the 27 federative units 12 presented a positive total productivity while all others suffered total productivity losses productivity gains in public security are more related to scale aspects than to efficiency improvements and technological progress

distributional effects of alternative vehicle pollution control policies abstract previous work shows that policies that subsidize new vehicles and tax size miles or gasoline efficiently reduce pollution less is known about their distributional effects this paper examines distributional effects by estimating the joint demand for vehicles and miles using the consumer expenditure survey greater price responsiveness among low income households enhances progressivity of gas or miles taxes across lower incomes and mitigates regressivity across upper incomes taxes on engine size or subsidies to new vehicles are significantly more regressive than gas or miles taxes