environmental policy and exports evidence from chinese cities we study environmental regulation and its role for trade in china specifically we assess the effectiveness of an environmental policy in china that introduced stricter regulations on sulfur dioxide so2 emissions in targeted cities to identify the causal effect of this policy on exports we use sectoral export data for a panel of chinese cities and exploit variations in exports between cities and sectors over time and in a second step between firm types we find a relative fall in sectoral exports in targeted cities after the implementation of the policy which is sharper the more polluting the industry further we find that the observed effect is mainly driven by privately owned firms whereas exports of state owned firms seem to be unaffected by the new policy this finding is consistent with the preferential political treatment of state owned firms in china

multiple environmental policies and pollution haven hypothesis evidence from china s polluting industries abstract theoretical studies of pollution haven hypothesis predict that differentiated environmental regulation policies will result in inter country relocation of polluting industries this paper investigates pollution haven hypothesis at domestic level in china using panel data of 30 provincial level regions for the period 2004 to 2013 this paper empirically examines to what extent multiple environmental policies affect intra country relocation of polluting industries in china it is found that the implementation of both economic policy instrument like pollution discharge fee and public participation like letter complaints on environmental problems encourages industrial relocation whereas the implementation of environmental legal policy instrument like laws regulations and rules prevents polluting industries from relocating to other regions it is also found that the relocation effect of environmental policies varies with industrial characteristics compared with water pollution intensive industry air pollution intensive industry dominated by stated owned capitals are insensitive to legal policy instruments these findings suggest that the validity of pollution haven hypothesis is jointly associated with the type of environmental policy as well as industrial characteristics

banking technology and the existence of a consistent output aggregate abstract this paper addresses the question of the existence of a consistent output aggregate in banking specific necessary and sufficient conditions for output aggregation are developed and tested in the context of a second order approximation to any arbitrary multi product bank cost function the analysis provides evidence that a composite aggregate measure of output fails to provide a proper representation of banking technology and therefore previous studies that used aggregate output measures may well be subject to specification errors

scale and scope economies at large banks including off balance sheet products and regulatory effects 1984 1991 this paper examines the impact of the risk based capital rbc requirements on bank cost efficiencies we take into consideration both on and off balance sheet obs products and allow product mixes to differ across banks and to vary over time our empirical results suggest that the cost structures of large banks are significantly different during the pre rbc and post rbc periods that is the rbc change seemed to reduce the optimal bank size that achieves maximum scale and scope economies so that some of the large banks that previously were efficient became too large and inefficient the results suggest that regulations that encourage large banks to expand their production and product mixes any further will likely result in a less efficient banking industry

an empirical investigation of changes in scale economies for the commercial banking firm 1979 1986 the period of the 1980s represents a particularly turbulent time for the banking industry a number of technological and regulatory changes have occurred including the elimination of regulation q which had limited the explicit interest payments that banks could pay on some types of deposits it would be expected that these changes would affect the structure of costs for banks the behavior of the cost function is studied over the 1979 1986 time period and in contrast to previous studies using earlier data increasing economies of scale are found in the later years for banks in both unit and branch banking states these results indicate that there may be increased cost pressure for smaller banks to become larger either through mergers and acquisitions or through internal growth this may lead to further consolidation pressures within the industry and reductions in the overall number of banking firms copyright 1991 by ohio state university press

economies of scale and scope in the securities industry abstract economies of scale and scope for the securities industry are estimated for the first time using previously unavailable survey data and employing the translog multiproduct cost function model the results reveal economies of scale for smaller specialized firms and diseconomies of scale for larger more diversified firms economies of scope do not appear to be important in the industry if the glass steagall restrictions are relaxed the results suggest that banks can enter the securities industry with a brokerage division of moderate scale of about 30 million in revenues the five million in new equity required suggests that only banks with assets over 1 billion and over 60 million in capital can enter the industry with a relatively modest investment there are however a substantial number of banks with over 1 billion in assets who can be considered as potential entrants

firm incentives to promote technological change in pollution control reply abstract the process of technological change in pollution control is broken into three basic steps innovation diffusion and optimal agency response firm incentives to promote these steps are then examined under five regulatory regimes direct controls emission subsidies emission taxes free marketable permits and auctioned marketable permits on a relative basis emission taxes and auctioned permits provide the highest firm incentives to promote technological change at times free permits generate lower incentives direct controls which are common regulatory tools usually provide the lowest relative firm incentives to promote technological change

measuring economies of diversification a frontier approach the purpose of this article is to improve the statistical analysis of multiproduct firm behavior specifically we are interested in modeling and estimating multiproduct technology focusing on size and product line variation thus we offer a new empirical technique that can be used to directly analyze issues such as subadditivity expansion path subadditivity economies of scope and economies of diversification although applied papers employ a wide variety of theoretical multiproduct cost concepts previous work uses nonfrontier estimation techniques we show how to introduce frontier approaches to multiproduct cost analysis that can be applied to any of these concepts and improve the statistical analysis specifically we introduce an empirical test using frontier techniques that allows for direct measures of economies of diversification at the firm specific level

is there an ekc between economic growth and smog pollution in china new evidence from semiparametric spatial autoregressive models abstract although china has achieved rapid economic growth it suffers from severe smog conditions determining how to promote cleaner production and environmental sustainability is of great significance in clarifying the relationship between income and pollutants within an extension of the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat framework the effects of economic growth on pm2 5 contamination are explicitly investigated based on a recent large sample of 249 chinese cities in 2015 from a nonlinear spatial perspective this study marks the first attempt at comprehensively exploring the nexus between the selected variables and pm2 5 emissions using semiparametric spatial autoregressive models which overcome the misspecification issues of conventional parametric models to avoid the limitations of a single method this study also applies different estimation techniques such as the spatial lag model slm the spatial autoregressive model with spatial autoregressive disturbances sarar two stage least squares regression 2slsr quantile regression qr and nonparametric regression npr the results reveal that pm2 5 pollutants show strong positive characteristics of spatial spillover the results also suggest that there is a significant inverted u shaped relationship between economic growth and pm2 5 concentrations which confirms the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis additionally the empirical findings highlight the influence that the population density industrialization urbanization and traffic development factors have on increasing pm2 5 emissions in contrast technological innovation and green coverage do not play important roles in reducing pm2 5 concentrations the distribution of pm2 5 concentrations displays apparent geographical features to provide an in depth understanding of these impacts marginal analysis is performed to distinguish the local and neighbouring effects of determinants on pm2 5 pollution

dynamics of environmental quality and economic development the regional experience from the yangtze river delta of china this article investigates the dynamic relationship between economic progress and environmental quality at a regional level an important economic intuition in this context is that environmental degradation will be limited by human behaviour if costs and benefits of such degradation are local since economic agents will then be incentivized to choose appropriate corrective action therefore we note the likelihood that regional economic development can help regions grow out of environmental problems using a new data set from yangtze river delta of china we find a strong confirmation of the intuition that human can and will resolve the environmental problem by altering the damaging behaviour of economic agents a very interesting finding of this study is that the relationship between environmental quality and economic progress measured by per capita income can display a wave like function in the case of water pollution as opposed to the much dramatized environmental kuznets curve with significant polic

a theoretical basis for the environmental kuznets curve abstract this paper attempts to explain the environmental kuznets curve ekc or inverted u shaped relationship between income and environmental degradation in the framework of endogenous growth model considering a closed economy one part of capital is used for commodity production which generates pollution that degrades existing environment and the remaining part is used for abating pollution i e upgrading environment sufficient abatement activity improves restores environmental quality a sufficient abatement activity associated with commodity production could only lead optimally towards steady state the ratio of allocation of capital between two sectors production and abatement is fixed along the optimal path but it varies along the non optimal path that exists in the off steady state in the economy allocation of capital for abatement activity varies over time thus a change from insufficient to sufficient allocation of capital i e investment for abatement activity is the basis for an inverted u shaped relationship between environmental quality and economic growth

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

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

externalities in urban sustainability environmental versus localization type agglomeration externalities in a general spatial equilibrium model of a single sector monocentric industrial city abstract this paper studies urban sustainability from the perspective of externalities we develop a general spatial equilibrium model of a monocentric city in which two types of externalities occur on the one hand pollution in the industrial center leads to a spatially differentiated deterioration of the environmental quality in the residential area on the other hand the existence of the city is explained by agglomeration economies represented as simple marshallian external benefits in production we investigate free market versus first best and second best optimal spatial equilibria and conclude that the pursuit of environmental goals may sometimes come at the expense of reduced agglomeration economies but may actually sometimes also stimulate these economies

multiproduct technology and market structure a recent line of research has exposed some technological determinants of the structure of industries that produce more than one good the analyses of both multiproduct perfect competition and natural monopoly require a generalized notion of average cost and in addition several newly identified technological characteristics pertinent only to joint production this paper provides an overview of these new results and suggests a unifying framework in which the theory can be further developed

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

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

regional industrial dynamics under the environmental pressures in china abstract this study investigates how air pollution affects industrial path creation and industrial dynamics in china moving beyond existing literature that pays more attention to environmental effects of industrial development this paper focuses on how industrial development path changes due to environmental pollution using the data from chinese customs trade statistics ccts which covers the export trade data of prefecture level cities in china during 2002 2006 and 2012 to 2016 this paper probes into the effect of air pollution on industrial dynamics econometric model and instrumental variable iv regression are used in empirical analysis given the potential endogeneity issue results suggest that the interaction term between air pollution and density is negatively related to new industries entry it means that air pollution can reduce the effect of relatedness on industrial diversification and lead to path breaking further a channel for how air pollution affects industrial dynamics is examined in order to respond to air pollution local government conducts environmental regulation to lower the negative influence of air pollution which can lead to path breaking during industrial diversification process finally this paper seeks to bridge two strands of literature environmental economic geography and evolutionary economic geography

scale economies and cost complementarities in commercial banks on and off balance sheet activities abstract bank off balance sheet obs activities have grown dramatically and have become significantly important especially at large banks we investigate whether failure to incorporate obs products may lead to a misspecification problem models that exclude deposits from the output specification suggest economies of scale which vanish when deposits are included we find that inclusion of obs products has little effect on the scale economies measures with only a few exceptions the results provide no evidence of cost complementarities in joint production the tremendous growth of bank obs activities in the 1980s may be explained by the very small approximately zero pecuniary cost of these activities

scale economies in banking a restructuring and reassessment the issue of scale economies in banking has a rich history most earlier studies report modest operating cost scale economies for small institutions those with less than about 50 million of deposits in 1968 dollars but are unclear where these economies might end if at all unfortunately these studies are limited in four important respects first those that were well specified did not measure the total cost of banking operations but concentrated on estimating scale economies for individual banking functions e g demand deposits separately from commercial loans second an average cost curve that could take a u shape over the full range of banks was not fitted either because larger banks were not included or because of the functional form used cobb douglas consequently the optimum or minimum cost size of a bank or office could not be determined third the variables measuring the costs of branching were misspecified fourth the branch

economies of scale and economies of scope in multiproduct financial institutions a study of british columbia credit unions this paper investigates the production technology facing computerized credit unions in canada a full system of translog cost equations is estimated in order to test for economies of scale economies of scope and other production characteristics in a multiproduct context the regression results indicate that most of the credit unions in our sample experience significant increasing returns to scale as they expand their level of output there is also evidence of cost complementarity or economies of scope in their mortgage and other lending activities as a result legislation which limits the ability of credit unions to grow and diversify will likely raise the operating costs of this important group of financial institutions additional structural tests of the most general translog specification suggest that none of the restrictive production conditions commonly imposed by other researchers using cobb douglas and ces specifications provide a valid representation of credit union technology the results of many earlier studies are therefore open to question this paper presents a number of structural tests of the production technology facing large computerized credit unions in canada a full system of translog cost equations is estimated using detailed cross sectional data on british columbia credit unions the parameter estimates obtained from our multiproduct specification allow us to test for economies of scale economies of scope and factor substitution unlike many earlier studies the present paper introduces the various outputs as separate variables instead of crudely proxying them with a single output measure such as total assets the total number of loans or the number of depositors by explicitly recognizing the multiproduct nature of the intermediation process we are able to address more interesting production questions and remove some of the bias caused by misspecification and measurement error in simpler approaches the flexible translog specification allows us to estimate the sensitivity of costs to proportionate increases in all outputs economies of scale as well as the cost savings firms realize by producing several outputs jointly rather than specializing in the production of one economies of scope the test results reported in the latter part of the paper suggest that increasing returns to scale exist in almost all of the credit unions in our sample though

the determinants of cost efficiency in cooperative financial institutions australian evidence abstract previous studies of efficiency in cooperative financial institutions assume subsidies to be a normal part of business operations using a sample of australian credit unions cus this paper shows that ignoring subsidies biases estimates of cost efficiency and efficiency rankings time varying cost efficiency is estimated using stochastic frontier and generalised within approaches and compared with the distribution free df approach assuming constant efficiency despite significant industry rationalisation average efficiency shows little improvement over the period 1985 1993 however efficiency rankings change considerably second stage regressions suggest bond type size age average deposit size and interest rate spreads are significant determinants of relative cost efficiency

technological change in large u s commercial banks this article examines technological change its relationship to firm size and its impact on the efficient scale of output and product mix for large u s commercial banks the results suggest that technological change lowered real costs by about one percent per year increased the cost minimizing scale of outputs and affected product mix the authors do not find support for the galbraith schumpeter hypothesis this suggests that the largest banks cannot use innovation alone to outpace smaller banks the major implications are that public policies allowing freer banking combinations do not necessarily run counter to the public interest copyright 1991 by university of chicago press

a study on long run inefficiency levels of a panel dynamic cost frontier under the framework of forward looking rational expectations abstract this paper aims to provide a theoretical underpinning of the dynamic efficiency model pioneered by ahn s c good d h sickles r c 2000 estimation of long run inefficiency levels a dynamic frontier approach econometric reviews 19 461 492 in the context of a quadratic loss function this paper formulates a multi period forward looking rational expectations model on the evolution of the technical inefficiency level which correctly produces a dynamic panel data model the model is illustrated using panel data of 112 french banks encouraging evidence of superiority in favor of the model is reached substantial cost inefficiency prevails in this industry where the constituent banks are characterized as having volatile adjustment speeds toward their long run steady states the sample banks exhibit increasing returns to scale and product mix economies

economies of superscale in commercial banking most previous studies of scale economies in banking have excluded banks larger than 1 billion in assets thus study by contrast estimates cost functions for the 100 largest us commercial banks hedonic terms are incorporated to correct for the aggregated nature of the call report data available for these banks in addition we attempt to quantify the cost benefit of diversification in the model we estimate efficient bank scale to range from 15 billion to 37 billion in total assets a thousandfold increase over some previous findings these results are supported by comparison of actual average costs as well as by casual historical observation and the level of widespread concern over interstate banking our findings suggest some cost incentive or benefit to expansion or consolidation among large regional banks including interstate expansion or consolidation

real output of bank services what counts is what banks do not what they own the measurement of bank output a difficult and contentious issue has become even more important in the aftermath of the devastating financial crisis of recent years in this paper we argue that models of banks as processors of information and transactions imply a quantity measure of bank service output based on transaction counts instead of balances of loans and deposits compiling new and comparable output measures for the united states and a range of european countries we show that our counts based output series exhibit significantly different growth patterns from those of our balances based output series over the years 1997 to 2009 since the u s official statistics rely on counts while european statistics rely on balances this implies a potentially considerable bias in the estimate of bank output growth in europe vis avis that in the united states

economy and environment a theoretical essay on the interdependence of economic and environmental systems preface notation guide 1 introduction part i the physical economy environment system 2 closed physical systems a model 3 structure and time in the physical system 4 technological change and the environmental constraints to physical growth part ii the economic system 5 the price system 6 prices property and the environment 7 economic conflict and environmental change part iii environmental strategies in an evolutionary economy environment system 8 time uncertainty and external effects 9 the market solution 10 the stationary state 11 conclusions references index

measuring the natural rate of interest international trends and determinants abstract u s estimates of the natural rate of interest the real short term interest rate that would prevail absent transitory disturbances have declined dramatically since the start of the global financial crisis for example estimates using the laubach williams 2003 model indicate the natural rate in the united states fell to close to zero during the crisis and has remained there into 2016 explanations for this decline include shifts in demographics a slowdown in trend productivity growth and global factors affecting real interest rates this paper applies the laubach williams methodology to the united states and three other advanced economies canada the euro area and the united kingdom we find that large declines in trend gdp growth and natural rates of interest have occurred over the past 25 years in all four economies these country by country estimates are found to display a substantial amount of comovement over time suggesting an important role for global factors in shaping trend growth and natural rates of interest

trade the pollution haven hypothesis and the environmental kuznets curve examining the linkages abstract this paper examines the extent to which the ekc inverted u relationship can be explained by trade and specifically the migration or displacement of dirty industries from the developed regions to the developing regions the pollution haven hypothesis phh using detailed data on north south trade flows for pollution intensive products the evidence for the phh is assessed emissions of 10 air and water pollutants are then estimated controlling for trade openness structural change and dirty north south trade flows evidence of pollution haven effects is found although such effects do not appear to be widespread and appear to be relatively small compared to the roles played other explanatory variables

institutions and diversification related versus unrelated diversification in a varieties of capitalism framework the varieties of capitalism literature has drawn little attention to industrial renewal and diversification while the related diversification literature has neglected the institutional dimension of industrial change bringing together both literatures the paper proposes that institutions have an impact on the direction of the diversification process in particular on whether countries gain a comparative advantage in new sectors that are close or far from what is already part of their existing industrial structure we investigate the diversification process in 23 developed countries by means of detailed product trade data in the period 1995 2010 our results show that relatedness is a stronger driver of diversification into new products in coordinated market economies while liberal market economies show a higher probability to move in more unrelated industries their overarching institutional framework gives countries more freedom to make a jump in their industrial evolution in particular we found that the role of relatedness as driver of diversification into new sectors is stronger in the presence of institutions that focus more on non market coordination in the domains of labor relations corporate governance relations product market relations and inter firm relations c 2015 elsevier b v all rights reserved less

is the negative interest rate policy effective abstract this paper examines the effectiveness of the negative interest rate policy conducted by several central banks to stabilize economic growth and inflation expectations through the signaling channel in doing so we assess survey based expectations data for up to 44 economies from 2002 to 2017 and analyze the impact of the adoption of a negative interest rate policy on expectations made by professionals based on a difference in differences approach our main findings are as follows first we show that the introduction of negative policy rates significantly reduces expectations regarding 3 month money market interest rates and also 10 year government bond yields second we also provide evidence for a significantly positive effect of this unconventional monetary policy tool on gdp growth and inflation expectations this implies that the negative interest rate policy appears to be effective in boosting economic growth and overcoming a deflationary spiral consequently the effect of negative nominal interest rates on real interest rate expectations is also negative

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

interest rate deregulation and banks off balance sheet activities a hong kong perspective through the interest rate deregulation and banks off balance sheet activities obsas in hong kong this study investigates the debate over the impact of banking deregulation on banks risk taking behaviour on the one hand the arrow effect implies that increased competition caused by the interest rate deregulation motivates hong kong banks to speed up their development of obsas as an additional but riskier income source on the other hand the schumpeterian effect implies that the deregulation may reduce the banks financial capability in developing new products and thus downscale their obsa adoption our findings show that while the negative scale effect is statistically insignificant the interest rate deregulation has a positive and significant impact on the adoption rate for all obsa categories we therefore conclude that the interest rate deregulation unambiguously leads to riskier bank behaviour in terms of higher obsa adoption

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

an examination of cost subadditivity and multiproduct production in large u s banks this paper examines the subadditivity of costs for a sample of the largest commercial banks in the u s we introduce into the bank production literature the grid approach developed by evans and heckman 1984 we estimate two models of the bank cost function one where deposits are treated as outputs while in the other deposits are treated as inputs the models are estimated using the commonly used translog and the more flexible miniflex laurent viewed narrowly the findings imply that cost complementarities are not the raison d etre for multiproduct production in the largest commercial banks subadditive costs however are sufficient but not necessary for multiproduct production it is quite possible for multiproduct production to be optimal when output are produced independently levy and haber 1986 and teece 1980 1982 it is only required that inputs be shareable as opposed to joint copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

bank regulation and monetary policy the depository institutions deregulation and monetary control act 1980 and the garn st germain depository institutions act 1982 are the two most significant pieces of bank legislation since the 193os their significance stems from the fact that they have sought to roll back a number of the regulations and restrictions imposed on bank activity and competition in the 1933 80 period among the important provisions of these acts are a gradual elimination of regulation q ceilings on time and savings deposits by march 1986 the amelioration of state imposed usury ceilings on loans the nationwide provision of interest bearing transaction type accounts negotiable order of withdrawal now and super now accounts permission for thritts to expand into bank like products such as commercial and industrial loans consumer loans and credit cards and the development of new types of savings accounts such as mmdas l in addition to legislative deregulation we have also witnessed homemade deregulation as banks have sought to exploit often with great success loopholes in the bank holding

democracy and environmental quality we develop and estimate an econometric model of the relationship between several local and global air pollutants and economic development while allowing for critical aspects of the socio political economic regime of a state we obtain empirical support for our hypothesis that democracy and its associated freedoms provide the conduit through which agents can exercise their preferences for environmental quality more effectively than under an autocratic regime thus leading to decreased concentrations or emissions of pollution however additional factors such as income inequality age distribution education and urbanization may mitigate or exacerbate the net effect of the type of political regime on pollution depending on the underlying societal preferences and the weights assigned to those preferences by the state

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

optimal interest rate smoothing this paper considers the desirability of the observed tendency of central banks to adjust interest rates only gradually in response to changes in economic conditions it shows in the context of a simple model of optimizing private sector behaviour that assignment of an interest rate smoothing objective to the central bank may be desirable even when reduction of the magnitude of interest rate changes is not a social objective in itself this is because a response of policy to irrelevant lagged variables may be desirable owing to the way it steers private sector expectations of future policy

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

how did bank holding companies prosper in the 1990s abstract this paper examines the improved performance of us bank holding companies bhcs from 1991 to 1997 analysis of cost and profit functions using several alternative output specifications suggests that the gains were primarily due to productivity growth and changes in scale economies various econometric methodologies yield productivity growth of about 0 4 per year and the optimal size seems to have increased in the 1990s era of deregulation technological change and financial innovation estimates of both productivity growth and economies of scale are robust across traditional and non traditional output specifications despite the overall success however substantial cost and profit inefficiency existed for bhcs of all sizes in the 1990s these efficiency estimates are particularly sensitive to the output specification and failure to account for non traditional activities like off balance sheet obs items leads profit efficiency but not cost efficiency to be understated for the largest bhcs

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

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

environmental regulation and industry location in europe this paper estimates the effect of environmental regulation on industry location and compares it with other determinants of location such as agricultural education and r d country characteristics the analysis is based on a general empirical trade model that captures the interaction between country and industry characteristics in determining industry location the johnson neyman technique is used to fully explicate the nature of the conditional interactions the model is applied to data on 16 manufacturing industries from 13 european countries the empirical results indicate that the pollution haven effect is present and that the relative strength of such an effect is of about the same magnitude as other determinants of industry location a significant negative effect on industry location is observed only at relatively high levels of industry pollution intensity

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

determinants of environmental innovation in us manufacturing industries abstract this paper provides new evidence on the determinants of environmental innovation we employ panel data models to study how environmental innovation by us manufacturing industries responded to changes in pollution abatement expenditures and regulatory enforcement during the period 1983 through 1992 we find that 1 environmental innovation as measured by the number of successful environmental patent applications granted to the industry responded to increases in pollution abatement expenditures however 2 increased monitoring and enforcement activities related to existing regulations did not provide any additional incentive to innovate we also find some empirical evidence that environmental innovation is more likely to occur in industries that are internationally competitive

has u s monetary policy tracked the efficient interest rate abstract interest rate decisions by central banks are universally discussed in terms of taylor rules which describe policy rates as responding to inflation and some measure of the output gap we show that an alternative specification of monetary policy in which the interest rate tracks the wicksellian efficient rate of return as the primary indicator of real activity fits the u s data better than otherwise identical taylor rules this result holds for a variety of specifications of the other ingredients of the policy rule including the output gap and of private agents behavior

relatedness as driver of regional diversification a research agenda relatedness as driver of regional diversification a research agenda regional studies the regional diversification literature claims that regions diversify in new activities related to their existing activities from which new activities draw on and combine local capabilities the paper offers a critical assessment and identifies a number of crucial issues for future research it calls for 1 a disentanglement of the various types of capabilities that make regions diversify 2 the inclusion of more geographical wisdom in the study of regional diversification like a focus on the effects of territory specific contexts such as institutions 3 a thorough investigation in the conditioning factors of related and unrelated diversification in regions and 4 a micro perspective on regional diversification that assesses the role of economic and institutional agents in a multi scalar perspective

technical scale and allocative efficiencies of turkish banking industry this paper investigates input and output efficiency in the turkish banking industry to understand the impact of size international variables ownership control and governance on profit cost allocative technical pure technical and scale efficiency measures employing a non parametric approach along with a parametric approach we estimate the efficiency of turkish banks over the 1988 1996 period this period allows us to account for the changes in the macro economy and regulatory treatment of the turkish banking industry over time our results suggest that the heterogeneous characteristics of banks have significant impact on their efficiency moreover cost and profit efficiencies of the turkish banks have exacerbated over time results also indicate that the dominant source of inefficiency in turkish banking is due to technical inefficiency rather than allocative inefficiency which is mainly attributed to diseconomies in scale to the extent that they chose an inefficient level of production bank management is responsible for scale inefficient operations however increasing demand for banking services in the nineties fueled by the state s increasing demand for funds to finance chronic budget deficits and high growth policies and the oligopolistic nature of the turkish banking market do not justify scale adjustments our policy suggestions are that the government implement financial reform packages that foster competition in the banking market and that the industry devise incentive schemes to improve managerial efficiency

a time varying natural rate of interest for the euro area abstract we estimate a time varying natural rate of interest tvnri for a synthetic euro area over the period 1979q1 2004q4 using a small macroeconomic model broadly following a methodology developed by laubach and williams 2003 measuring the natural rate of interest the review of economics and statistics 85 4 1063 1070 for the united states the kalman filter simultaneously estimates the output gap and the natural rate of interest our identifying assumptions include a close relationship between the tvnri and the low frequency fluctuations of potential output growth the difference between the real rate of interest and its estimated natural level offers valuable insights into the monetary policy stance over the last two decades and a half

the natural rate of interest and its usefulness for monetary policy we estimate a state of the art dsge model to study the natural rate of interest in the united states over the last 20 years the natural rate is highly procyclical and fell substantially below zero in each of the last three recessions although the drop was of comparable magnitude across the three recessions the decline was considerably more persistent in the great recession we discuss the usefulness and limitations particularly due to the zero lower bound of the natural rate for the conduct of monetary policy

instability imprecision and inconsistent use of equilibrium real interest rate estimates abstract the debate on monetary and fiscal policy is heavily influenced by estimates of the equilibrium real interest rate in particular this concerns estimates derived from a simple aggregate demand and phillips curve model with time varying components as proposed by laubach and williams 2003 for example summers 2014a refers to these estimates as important evidence for a secular stagnation and the need for fiscal stimulus yellen 2015 2017 has made use of such estimates in order to explain and justify why the federal reserve has held interest rates so low for so long first we re estimate the united states equilibrium rate with the methodology of laubach and williams 2003 then we build on their approach and an alternative specification to provide new estimates for the united states germany the euro area and japan third we subject these estimates to a battery of sensitivity tests due to the great uncertainty and sensitivity that accompany these equilibrium rate estimates the observed decline in the estimates is not a reliable indicator of a need for expansionary monetary and fiscal policy yet if these estimates are employed to determine the appropriate monetary policy stance such estimates are better used together with the consistent estimate of the level of potential output