financial markets and growth the last five years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the relationship between financial intermediation and economic growth this issue had been extensively studied nearly two decades earlier by goldsmith 1969 mckinnon 1973 shaw 1973 and others who produced considerable evidence that financial development correlates with growth but their work though insightful lacked analytical foundations in traditional growth theory financial intermediation could be related to the level of the capital stock per worker or to the level of productivity but not to their respective growth rates the latter were ascribed to exogenous technical progress the recent revival of interest in the link between financial development and growth stems mainly from the insights and techniques of endogenous growth models which have shown that there can be self sustaining growth without exogenous technical progress and that the growth rate can be related to preferences technology income distribution and institutional arrangements this provides the theoretical underpinning that early contributors lacked tinancial intermediation can be shown to have not only level effects but also growth effects the resulting models have offered important insights into the effect of financial development on growth and vice versa they have also provided new impetus to empirical research on these issues this paper reviews the ground covered so far on the theoretical and empirical front and points to some still unresolved issues

making the same mistake again or is this time different the world faces an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions but much of the policy response has certainly not lacked for precedent national governments and international organisations including the international monetary fund imf have looked to crises of the past for solutions to the present and austerity has become a familiar theme the inability to effectively resolve the current crisis however gives rise to the question is this time different this article provides a broad overview to the origins and development of the recent economic crisis and the resort to policies of austerity although there is historical precedent for the resort to austerity such as the uk treasury view during the 1920s and 1930s this time things are different many of the current problems are deeply rooted and reflect the impact of the shift towards free market economics that started in the 1970s 2 the origins of the crisis since the beginning of the 1970s the private sector finance in particular has reorganised on an increasingly global scale it has innovated in terms of both structure and products and it has experienced significant growth as tridico 2012 this issue shows this financialisation was characterised by a ballooning of stock exchanges as many firms decided not only to list their shares but also to become involved in speculative finance in response to pressures on firms to maximise shareholder value together with the progressive erosion of worker and trade union rights and influence labour markets became more flexible and real wages stagnated concurrently profits rebounded leading to burgeoning inequality in this context aggregate demand and consumption were bolstered by easy credit and the wealth effects of speculative bubbles first in stocks and shares and then in housing

wheat from chaff meta analysis as quantitative literature review abstract this paper presents and develops a quantitative method of literature reviewing and evaluating empirical research meta regression analysis or mra economics is theory driven yet we must learn empirically if economics is to advance mra offers a more objective statistical method to summarize our empirical knowledge and to explain the wide study to study variation in economic research mra is used to assess the evidence for ricardian equivalence and its findings are contrasted to those of conventional narrative review furthermore mra establishes a platform from which to distinguish genuine empirical effect from the exploitable specification error that infests applied econometrics

the role of the media in fiscal consolidation programmes the case of ireland a number of european countries have implemented austerity programmes since the onset of the current economic crisis this paper focuses on fiscal consolidation a central aspect of such programmes using the case of ireland it investigates the significant role of the mass media in presenting such policies to the public a role which has so far remained unexamined conceiving of the irish experience over the past few decades as a case of neoliberalisation it uses a critical political economic conceptualisation of news organisations to consider 431 editorials and opinion articles discussing fiscal consolidation in three leading irish newspapers between 2008 and 2012 it finds that the majority of articles present viewpoints in favour of fiscal consolidation and display a preference for spending cuts over tax hikes which substantiates the claim that ireland has adopted neoliberal policies to address the crisis only a minority of articles oppose fiscal consolidation these mostly contest specific spending cuts but usually fail to criticise fiscal consolidation itself by calling for economic alternatives such as keynesian stimulus differences between newspapers are also discussed highlighting their ideological cleavages

the efficiency of european regional banking w illiams j and g ardener e p m 2003 the efficiency of european regional banking reg studies 37 321 330 financial deregulation may segment european banking into pan national and regional tiers regional banking must finance productive investment to facilitate regional economic growth local banks are the appropriate financing vehicles because of their specialist knowledge of regional market risks and conditions employing stochastic frontier analysis the efficiency of regional banks in producing financial services is estimated along with the determinants of bank cost inefficiencies regional banks are found to be highly cost efficient with inefficiencies significantly correlated with bank liquidity competitiveness capitalization and organizational structure financial deregulation accompanies significant improvements in bank productivity whereas moves by banks towards industry best practice are positive but insignificant w illiams j et g ardener e p m 2003 l efficacite des operations

a comparative study of efficiency in european banking this paper investigates whether there has been an improvement in and convergence of productive efficiency across european banking markets since the creation of the single internal market using efficiency measures derived from dea estimation the determinants of european bank efficiency are evaluated using the tobit regression model approach the established literature on modelling the determinants of bank efficiency is then extended by recognizing the problem of the inherent dependency of dea efficiency scores when used in regression analysis to overcome the dependency problem a bootstrapping technique is applied overall the results suggest that since the eu s single market programme there has been a small improvement in bank efficiency levels although there is little evidence to suggest that these have converged the results also suggest that inference on the determinants of bank efficiency drawn from non bootstrapped regression analysis may be biased and misleading

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

comparative performance analysis between conventional and islamic banks empirical evidence from oic countries this article investigates the performance of islamic ibs versus conventional banks cbs around the recent financial crisis in 18 oic organization of islamic conference countries the study primarily employs two dominant frontier approaches of efficiency measurement in banking literature the study also estimates the soundness score of the banks by using z score methodology and attempts to explore the relationship between efficiency and financial stability of banks the results based on the data envelopment analysis dea and stochastic frontier analysis sfa approaches report that cbs are more efficient than their islamic counterparts on the contrary z score reports that ibs were financially more stable than cbs however the dominance of ibs has been drastically lost afterwards this might be originated by the decrease of z score of ibs in bahrain kuwait and uae which were found as main front runners among ibs in terms of financial stability to the best of authors knowledge it is the first s

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

the impact of islamic banking on the cost efficiency and productivity change of malaysian commercial banks this study employs stochastic frontier analysis sfa to analyse malaysian commercial banks during 1996 2002 and particularly focuses on determining the impact of islamic banking on performance we derive both net and gross efficiency estimates thereby demonstrating that differences in operating characteristics explain much of the difference in costs between malaysian banks we also decompose productivity change into efficiency technical and scale change using a generalized malmquist productivity index on average malaysian banks experience moderate scale economies and annual productivity change of 2 68 with the latter driven primarily by technical change tc which has declined over time our gross efficiency estimates suggest that islamic banking is associated with higher input requirements however our productivity estimates indicate that full fledged islamic banks have overcome some of these cost disadvantages with rapid tc although this is not the case for conventional banks operating islamic windows merged banks are found to have higher input usage and lower productivity change suggesting that bank mergers have not contributed positively to bank performance finally our results suggest that while the east asian financial crisis had a short term costreducing effect in 1998 the crisis triggered a long lasting negative impact by increasing the volume of nonperforming loans

the euro crisis undetected by conventional economics favoured by nationally focused polity this article interprets the initial success of the launch of the euro and its muddling through since the outbreak of the greek sovereign debt crisis two interrelated processes interacted to deliver a quite complex idiosyncratic systemic crisis first new classical macroeconomics had diffused the belief that market economies are structurally stable money is neutral financial markets are efficient and that the only culprit is public finance the euro crisis was thus inaccurately diagnosed second in the political arena monetary integration has been used by many governments as a justification for liberalisation reforms opposed by various domestic social groups at the european level most governments have been defending national interests whereas the european commission and european parliament had lost most of their expertise and legitimacy in defending a common community in line euro ambitions crisis resolution calls for leadership from a key collective actor to return coherence to the eurozone s institutional setting copyright oxford university press

not your grandfather s imf global crisis productive incoherence and developmental policy space the response by the international monetary fund imf and developing country national governments to the current global financial crisis represents a moment of what i term productive incoherence which has displaced the constraining neoliberal coherence of the past several decades productive incoherence refers to the proliferation of inconsistent and even contradictory strategies and statements by the imf that to date have not congealed into any sort of new organised regime those who see continuity at the imf emphasise the reassertion of the imf s authority the reiteration of pro cyclical policy adjustment and the maintenance of existing governance patterns within the institution in contrast evidence of discontinuity includes a world now populated by increasingly autonomous states in the south the normalisation of capital controls and fund conditionality programmes that are inconsistent in key respects in the face of this evidence it is best to understand the current conjuncture as an interregnum that is pregnant with new development possibilities

distribution of cost and profit efficiency evidence from indian banking this paper uses the nonparametric dea methodology to estimate cost and profit efficiency of indian banks during the post reform period the results show considerable variation in average levels of profit efficiency across various ownership categories of banks in general state owned banks are found to be more efficient than their private counter parts further efficiency tends to be low among the small banks assets up to rs 50 billion indicating that at the existing scale of operations these banks are operating far below the efficient frontier we also examine the distribution of efficiency using nonparametric kernel density estimates the analysis reveals a rightward shift of the efficiency distribution over the years a major part of this shift comes from the state owned banks based on the conditional distribution the study finds strong evidence of ownership explaining the efficiency differential of banks additionally bank size and product mix are also found to be important although to a lesser extent

large cash transfers to the elderly in south africa we examine the social pension in south africa where large cash sums about twice the median per capita income of african households are paid to people qualified by age but irrespective of previous contributions we present the history of the scheme and use a 1993 nationally representative survey to investigate the redistributive consequences of the transfers documenting who receive the pensions their levels of living and those of their families we also look at behavioural effects particularly the effects of the cash receipts on the allocation of income to food schooling transfers and savings in south africa a large social pension about twice the median per capita income of african households is paid in cash to people qualified by age irrespective of previous contributions we present the history of the scheme and explain how such large transfers could come about in an economy in which the recipients were not only politically weak but without any political representation whatsoever we then use a 1993 nationally representative survey to investigate the redistributive consequences of the transfers documenting who receive the pensions their levels of living and those of their families we also look at behavioural effects particularly the effects of the cash receipts on the allocation of income to food schooling transfers and savings the pressing policy issue for south africans is whether it makes sense to target seven billion rand nearly 2 billion of social expenditure through the current pension schemes our analysis contributes to the discussion by documenting the redistributive and behavioural effects of the transfers we find that at least as far as immediate incidence is concerned and without allowance for behavioural effects the social pension is an effective tool of redistribution and that the households it reaches are predominantly poor because so many of the elderly among south africa s african population live with children the social pension is also effective in putting money into house

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

resolving the deposit dilemma a new dea bank efficiency model abstract one of the weaknesses of current bank efficiency models is a disagreement as to the role of deposits in the bank production process some models view deposits as an input while others view them as an output such disparity of approaches results in inconsistent efficiency estimates in this study we propose an alternative data envelopment analysis dea bank efficiency model that treats deposits as an intermediate product thus emphasizing the dual role of deposits in the bank production process consequently the effect of the amount of deposits on bank efficiency depends on the efficiency at both stages of the bank production process the main advantage of our model is that it does not require a researcher to make a judgment call as to whether having more production approach or less intermediation approach deposits is better for bank efficiency our unified framework has the potential to produce more consistent efficiency estimates

from miracle to cronyism explaining the great asian slump explanations are about the only thing not in short supply in the asian crisis for all their diversity they can be collapsed into two meta interpretations reflecting deeper differences in beliefs about rationality and markets those whose world view emphasizes rationality self adjusting markets and market failure as exceptional except when governments introduce distortions tend to see the crisis as the result of rational calculations in a situation of market distorting government interventions and institutional weaknesses in asian economies those whose world view stresses non rationality or a different kind of rationality than that assumed by neoclassical theory routine failure of well working markets and the need for government interventions to modify market outcomes tend to see it as the result of non rational calculations in under regulated financial markets both national and international

the structural pension reform in chile effects comparisons with other latin american reforms and lessons chile pioneered a structural reform in latin america that privatized its public pension system and influenced similar reforms in another nine countries twenty five years later this article evaluates the macroeconomic microeconomic and social effects of this reform in chile and the other countries in the region and extracts lessons from those experiences fiscal costs of the reform have been high and prolonged exceeded capital accumulation and had a negative impact on national savings but chile s reform has contributed to the development of capital markets employer s contributions were eliminated or reduced in half of the countries and the worker s share in the total contribution averages 65 per cent competition is afflicted by a small number of administrators and a high level of concentration administrative costs are high and stagnant capital returns are fair but declining portfolio diversification has been achieved only in chile and peru labour force coverage has declined in all ten countries and gender and income inequalities have expanded copyright 2006 oxford university press

trade liberalization and regional dynamics abstract we study the evolution of trade liberalization s effects on brazilian local labor markets regions facing larger tariff cuts experienced prolonged declines in formal sector employment and

quantile regression for robust bank efficiency score estimation abstract we discuss quantile regression techniques as a robust and easy to implement alternative for estimating farell technical efficiency scores the quantile regression approach estimates the production process for benchmark banks located at top conditional quantiles monte carlo simulations reveal that even when generating data according to the assumptions of the stochastic frontier model sfa efficiency estimates obtained from quantile regressions resemble sfa efficiency estimates we apply the sfa and the quantile regression approach to german bank data for three banking groups commercial banks savings banks and cooperative banks to estimate efficiency scores based on a simple value added function and a multiple input multiple output cost function the results reveal that the efficient benchmark banks have production and cost elasticities which differ considerably from elasticities obtained from conditional mean functions and stochastic frontier functions

financial liberalization and bank efficiency a comparative analysis of india and pakistan this paper provides a comparative analysis of the evolution of the technical efficiency of commercial banks in india and pakistan during 1988 1998 a period characterized by far reaching changes in the banking industry brought about by financial liberalization data envelopment analysis is applied to two alternative input output specifications to measure technical efficiency and to decompose technical efficiency into its two components pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency the consistency of the estimated efficiency scores are checked by examining their relationship with three traditional non frontier measures of bank performance in addition the relationship between bank size and technical efficiency is examined it is found that the overall technical efficiency of the banking industry of both countries improved gradually over the years especially after 1995 unlike public sector banks in india public sector banks in pakistan witnessed improvement in scale efficiency only it is also found that banks are relatively more efficient in generating earning assets than in generating income this is attributed to the presence of high non performing loans in addition it is found that the gap between the pure technical efficiency of different size groups has declined over the years

efficiency and productivity growth in the banking industry of central and eastern europe abstract we employ the directional technology distance function and provide estimates of bank efficiency and productivity change across central and eastern european cee countries and across banks with different ownership status for the period 1998 2003 our results demonstrate the strong links of competition and concentration with bank efficiency they also show that productivity for the whole region initially declined but has improved more recently with further progress on institutional and structural reforms input biased technical change has been consistently positive throughout the entire period suggesting that the reforms have induced favorable changes in relative input prices and input mix however we find evidence of diverging trends in productivity growth patterns across banking industries and that foreign banks outperform domestic private and state owned banks both in terms of efficiency and productivity gains overall we find that productivity change in cee is driven by technological change rather than efficiency change

determinants of bank efficiency the case of brazil abstract this paper analyzes the efficiency of the brazilian banking sector over the post privatization period of 2000 2007 we employ a bayesian stochastic frontier approach which provides exact efficiency estimates and confidence intervals and thus allows an accurate comparison across institutions and bank groups the results suggest that large banks are the most cost and profit efficient supporting the concentration process observed in recent years foreign banks have achieved a good performance through either the establishment of new affiliates and the acquisition of local banks the remaining public banks have had improvements in cost efficiency but are relatively profit inefficient finally we observe a positive impact of capitalization on efficiency

evolution of bank efficiency in brazil a dea approach abstract this paper investigates cost technical and allocative efficiencies for brazilian banks in the recent period 2000 2007 we use data envelopment analysis dea to compute efficiency scores brazilian banks were found to have low levels of economic cost efficiency compared to banks in europe and in the us for the period with high macroeconomic volatility 2000 2002 the economic inefficiency in brazilian banks can be attributed mainly to technical inefficiency rather than allocative inefficiency state owned banks are significantly more cost efficient than foreign private domestic and private with foreign participation there is no evidence of differences in economic efficiency due to type of activity and bank size these results may provide some useful guidance for financial regulators and bank managers

reforming pensions lessons from economic theory and some policy directions pension systems have wide ranging and important effects they influ ence the living standards of older people and hence the welfare of both older people and their children they can also affect national economic performance through potential effects on the labor supply and saving the design of pensions therefore matters in discussing the topic this paper draws on two of our earlier works 1 it starts by setting out some central lessons from economic theory the second section derives some policy implications of particular relevance to latin america the policy chapters in our two earlier books focus particularly on two countries in which we have worked china which is important because of its size and chile which is important because its 1981 reforms were widely adopted in latin america and elsewhere and which has become an exemplar in the pension debate box 1 defines some of the relevant terms the final section concludes

capital requirements and the behaviour of commercial banks abstract i study the consequences of capital regulations on the portfolio choices of commercial banks elaborating on previous work by kareken and wallace 1978 koehn and santomero 1980 and kim and santomero 1988 i obtain the following results if the objective of commercial banks is maximization of the market value of their future profits value maximizing banks capital regulations cannot prevent banks from choosing very specialized and very risky portfolios risk based insurance premia are in fact the relevant instrument for that purpose on the other hand if banks behave as portfolio managers utility maximizing banks capital regulations can be effective but only if the weights used in the computation of the ratio are proportional to the systematic risks of the assets their betas because of limited liability of commercial banks a minimum capital regulation or a closing rule may become necessary as well to prevent failing banks from betting for resurrection

a comprehensive analysis of the effects of risk measures on bank efficiency evidence from emerging asian countries this study investigates the role of risk in determining the cost efficiency of international banks in eight emerging asian countries researchers of this paper consider three distinct risk aspects under a total of eight risk measures credit risk operational risk and market risk we apply a heteroscedastic stochastic frontier model to estimate bank cost efficiency in our analysis additionally this study analyzes the marginal effects of all risk measures on the inefficiency effect in order to explore a more detailed relationship between risks and efficiency the empirical results indicate that the risk measures represent significant effects on both the level and variability of bank efficiency we also find that these effects vary across countries and over time

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

evaluating the cost efficiency of the italian banking system what can be learned from the joint application of parametric and non parametric techniques abstract research on bank efficiency has developed in two separate streams econometric studies and data envelopment analysis a linear programming technique these two branches of literature have developed quickly but separately in this paper these two approaches have been tested on a common panel of 270 italian banks and this has suggested the following i econometric and linear programming results do not differ dramatically when based on the same data and conceptual framework ii when differences arise they can be explained by going back to the intrinsic features of the models moreover some findings on italian banks may be of interest also to the international reader i efficiency scores show a high variance ii the banking system is split in two between northern and southern banks iii there is a direct rather than inverse relationship between productive efficiency and asset quality iv the efficiency of italian banks did not increase over the period 1988 1992

iceland s rise fall stabilisation and beyond iceland is an unusually pure example of the dynamics that blocked regulation and caused financial fragility across the developed world for 20 years this essay describes the statist and corporatist political economy of the country as it soared from near the bottom of the western european income hierarchy at the end of the world war ii to up near the top by the 1980s it illustrates how a group of neoliberal politicians and allied civil servants drove through selective deregulation and privatisation in the 1990s and 2000s in the space created for newly privatised banks icelandic financiers grew the banks and linked private equity firms through mergers and acquisitions abroad to the point where by 2007 tiny iceland supported three banks in the world s biggest 300 banks with assets eight times the gdp second highest in the world after switzerland as profits from these overseas operations were partly redistributed back to iceland the economy boomed in the grip of super minsky processes the government the banks and the media interpreted the boom as testimony to the validity of neoliberal policies and went out of their way to hide increasing financial fragility from view preventing a negative or self correcting policy feedback loop the accident waiting to happen happened in the wake of the lehman collapse in september 2008 the essay charts the zigzags of the government s response and the citizens response and discusses the prospects for a resumption of growth on a more sustainable basis it suggests that iceland illustrates in miniature the ratcheting down of mass living standards underway across the western world now that the cushion of debt has been removed even as financiers and others in the top few percentiles of national income distributions increase their share of national income but economic institutions and politics matter in iceland the large devaluation spread the cut in a relatively apolitical way the government let the banks go bust rather than bail them out at taxpayers expense it imposed capital controls on outflows and it used fiscal transfers to protect the bottom half of the population from disproportionate cuts

savings in chile what went right abstract in the last 10 years chile s overall economic performance has been remarkable in many respects including a significant and sustained increase in domestic savings to figures around 26 of gdp this paper empirically assesses the reasons behind such notable behavior of savings by applying co integration models to check for long run relationships and error correction models to verify short run adjustments the emphasis is on annual private savings data span from 1960 to 1995 which as it turns out depend more than proportionally on an adjusted measure of gdp and less than proportionally on foreign savings and public savings private savings are also positively affected by economic growth and a dummy reflecting the effect of pension funds most of the adjustment between short run and long run is completed in less than 3 years where the variable representing income bears the bulk of such adjustment in comparing two episodes of good economic performance in the last 20 years 1976 1981 and 1986 till present it is found that three basic differences arise concerning private savings sustainability of growth different access to foreign savings during the recovery from recession and different scenarios with respect to the development of long run capital markets in particular a relevant role played the move to a fully funded social security system in the early 1980s

wine prices and quality ratings a meta regression analysis this article examines the empirical support for the hypothesized hedonic theoretical relation between the price of wine and its quality the examination considers over 180 hedonic wine price models developed over 20 years covering many countries the research identifies that the relation between the price of wine and its sensory quality rating is a moderate partial correlation of 0 30 this correlation exists despite the lack of information held by consumers about a wine s quality and the inconsistency of expert tasters when evaluating wines the results identify a moderate price quality correlation which suggests the existence of strategic buying opportunities for better informed consumers strategic price setting possibilities may also exist for wine producers given the incomplete quality information held by consumers the results from the meta regression analysis point to the absence of any publication bias and attribute the observed asymmetry in estimates to study heterogeneity the analysis suggests the observed heterogeneity is explained by the importance of a wine s reputation the use of the 100 point quality rating scale the analysis of a single wine variety style and the employed functional form the most important implication from the analysis is the relative importance of a wine s reputation over its sensory quality inferring that producers need to sustain the sensory quality of a wine over time to extract appropriate returns the reputation of the wine producer is found not to influence the strength of the price quality relationship this finding does not contradict the importance of wine producer reputation in directly influencing prices

active labor market policy evaluations a meta analysis this article presents a meta analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies we categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007 job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective training programmes are associated with positive medium term impacts although in the short term they often appear ineffective we also find that the outcome variable used to measure programme impact matters but neither the publication status of a study nor the use of a randomised design is related to the sign or significance of the programme estimate

the identification of technology regimes in banking implications for the market power fragility nexus neglecting the existence of different technologies in banking can contaminate efficiency market power and other performance measures by simultaneously estimating i technology regimes conditional on exogenous factors ii efficiency conditional on risk management and iii lerner indices of german banks we identify three distinct technology regimes public retail small specialized and universal relationship system estimation at the regional level reveals that greater bank market power increases bank profitability but also fosters corporate defaults corporate defaults in turn lead to higher probabilities of bank distress which supports the market power fragility hypothesis c 2009 elsevier b v all rights reserved

universal pensions for developing countries summary the governments of new zealand mauritius namibia botswana bolivia nepal samoa brunei kosovo and mexico city provide a basic pension to the elderly with no test other than citizenship residence and age these universal non means tested pensions automatically protect an entire population in a way that contributory earnings related pensions never can the author examines the value of this scheme for low income countries and argues that an income test if desired is best done ex post through the tax system rather than ex ante even though there are few examples of ex post recovery systems operating in the world today

a note on banking efficiency in portugal new vs old banks following entry into the european community in 1986 portugal transformed rapidly its repressed banking system with deregulation the opening of borders the granting of new banking licenses and privatization in a more competitive banking system one would expect a priori an increase in operational efficiency this paper attempts to quantify the magnitude of efficiency gains over the years 1990 1995 moreover the paper documents the relative efficiency performance of new domestic banks not hampered by a legacy of inefficiency from the past they could operate nearer the efficiency frontier the case of portugal provides unique information on the joint effect of deregulation and the granting of new banking licenses on the change in operational efficiency of a previously repressed banking system

on the sources of heterogeneity in banking efficiency literature one learns two main lessons from studying the great quantity of banking efficiency literature these lessons regard the heterogeneity in results and the absence of a comprehensive review aimed at understanding the reasons for this variability surprisingly although this issue is well known it has not been systematically analyzed before in order to fill this gap we perform a meta regression analysis mra by examining 1 661 efficiency scores retrieved from 120 papers published over the period 2000 2014 the meta regression is estimated by using the random effects multilevel model reml because it controls for within study and between study heterogeneity the analysis yields four main results firstly parametric methods yield lower levels of banking efficiency than nonparametric studies this holds true even after controlling for the approach used in selecting the inputs and outputs of the frontier secondly we show that banking efficiency is highest when using the value added approach followed by estimates from studies based on the intermediation method whereas those based on the hybrid approach are the lowest thirdly efficiency scores also depend on the quality of studies and on the number of observations and variables used in the primary papers as far as the effects of sample size dimension and quality of papers are concerned there are significant differences in sign and magnitude between parametric and nonparametric studies finally cost efficiency is found to be higher than profit and production efficiency interestingly mra results are robust to the potential outliers in efficiency and sample size distributions