long run estimates of technological change and scale economies in a dynamic framework australian permanent building societies 1974 1990 abstract this paper formulates and estimates a dynamic model to investigate the characteristics of the cost function of australian permanent building societies while the results suggest that the societies adjust costs quickly to long run levels the modelling of cost dynamics is shown to have a significant influence on estimates of scale economies and on the identification of the timing of shifts in the cost frontier and changes in the growth of total factor productivity

is there a glass ceiling in sweden using 1998 data we show that the gender log wage gap in sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail we interpret this as a strong glass ceiling effect we use quantile regression decompositions to examine whether this pattern can be ascribed primarily to gender differences in labor market characteristics or in the rewards to those characteristics even after extensive controls for gender differences in age education both level and field sector industry and occupation we find that the glass ceiling effect we see in the raw data persists to a considerable extent

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

women directors on corporate boards from tokenism to critical mass academic debate on the strategic importance of women corporate directors is widely recognized and still open however most corporate boards have only one woman director or a small minority of women directors therefore they can still be considered as tokens this article addresses the following question does an increased number of women corporate boards result in a build up of critical mass that substantially contributes to firm innovation the aim is to test if at least three women could constitute the desired critical mass by identifying different minorities of women directors one woman two women and at least three women tests are conducted on a sample of 317 norwegian firms the results suggest that attaining critical mass going from one or two women a few tokens to at least three women consistent minority makes it possible to enhance the level of firm innovation moreover the results show that the relationship between the critical mass of women directors and the level of firm innovation is mediated by board strategic tasks implications for both theory and practice and future research directions are discussed

the development of agricultural policies in central and eastern europe abstract agricultural and food subsidies and fixed prices imposed by the old central command system have been abolished recently throughout central and eastern europe cee however protectionist government regulations have been reintroduced this viewpoint argues that these policy changes are consistent with the results from the literature on new political economy or endogenous policy theory moreover as privatization of farms continues and the non agricultural sectors of the economy start growing this theory predicts that protectionist policies will increase in the agricultural sector in central and eastern europe in addition agricultural protectionism in western countries stimulates the increase in cee agricultural protectionism

the composite cost function and efficiency in giant japanese banks abstract this study provides further empirical investigation in the context of giant japanese banks of the recent claim by pulley and braunstein 1992 a composite cost function for multiproduct firms with an application to economies of scope in banking review of economics and statistics 74 221 230 that their new composite model for the multiproduct cost function has important advantages over the separable quadratic generalized translog and standard translog models in addition to assessing the composite model s relative ability in measuring global scope and scale economies the study also extends the p b analysis to assess measurement of product specific scope and scale economies pairwise cost complementarities between outputs changes in the marginal costs of outputs and technological change the results appear to confirm p b s chain the persistent finding of scale economies for large japanese banks is also investigated and confirmed

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

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency in their comment subhash c ray and evangelia desli 1997 hereafter rd point out that the specification of the decomposition of the malmquist productivity index used by fare et al 1994 hereafter fgnz is not unique and propose and compute an alternative specification of that decomposition we will discuss additional decompositions at the end of this note but proceed here by comparing the rd decomposition with fgnz based on both conceptual and computational grounds rd provide a discussion of the overall malmquist productivity index including the important issue of when this index is equivalent to the traditional notion of total factor productivity tfp namely under the condition that the reference technology be consistent with constant returns to scale crs as they point out this will yield a measure of tfp even if the true underlying technology is not crs for example both rd and fgnz use the crs reference technology to compute overall malmquist productivity one of the key issues raised is the role of the underlying scale properties of the benchmark technologies used to define and compute both productivity and its components in particular two reference technologies are employed in both rd and fgnz what we refer to as crs and variable returns to scale vrs technologies by construction these technologies are nested the crs technology contains the vrs technology as in figure 1 in rd this nestedness provides the logical basis for our decomposition at a very intuitive level we would argue that these two benchmarks can be used to provide bounds on the underlying true but unknown technology 2 intuitively we see the vrs technology providing a type of convex inner approximation whereas the crs technology provides a type of convex outer approximation thus these two technologies provide alternative benchmarks they do not require that the data satisfy either crs or vrs another possible intuitive interpretation is that the crs captures a perhaps hypothetical long run and the vrs approximates the short run as a reference technology the crs technology has some very useful features for example it captures the notion of maximal

where women make a difference gender quotas and firms performance in three european countries the authors study the effect of corporate board gender quotas on firm performance in france italy and spain the identification strategy exploits the exogenous variation in mandated gender quotas within country and over time and uses a counterfactual methodology using firm level accounting data and a difference in difference estimator the authors find that gender quotas had either a negative or an insignificant effect on firm performance in the countries considered with the exception of italy where they find a positive impact on productivity the authors then focus on italy using a novel data set containing detailed information on board members characteristics they offer possible explanations for the positive effect of gender quotas the results provide an important contribution to the policy debate about the optimal design of legislation on corporate gender quotas

the sources of productivity change in spanish banking abstract in this paper we examine the pattern of productivity change in spanish banking over the period 1986 1993 two sectors dominate spanish banking commercial banks and the faster growing savings banks we begin by examining productivity change separately within each sector however since the two sectors are gradually becoming more competitive we continue by merging the two sectors and by examining productivity change in the industry the merging procedure follows a methodology originally proposed by charnes cooper and rhodes 1981 in which intra sectoral managerial inefficiency is eliminated prior to merging this procedure allows us to distinguish differences in managerial efficiency within each sector from differences in the institutional efficiency of the two sectors it also enables us to decompose potential productivity change into institutional efficiency change technical change and the impact of scale economies we find the commercial banks to have had a slightly lower rate of productivity growth but a slightly higher rate of potential productivity growth we attribute this phenomenon to differences in both managerial efficiency and institutional efficiency to differences in the rate of technical progress and to the adverse impact of diseconomies of scale in the commercial banking sector

collaboration in the boardroom behavioral and performance consequences of ceo board social ties empirical research has typically rested on the assumption that board independence from management enhances board effectiveness in administering firms the present study shows how and when a lack of social independence can increase board involvement and firm performance by raising the frequency of advice and counsel interactions between ceos and outside directors hypotheses were tested with original survey data from 243 ceos and 564 outside directors on behavioral processes and dynamics in management board relationships

a study of bank efficiency taking into account risk preferences abstract i use the stochastic cost frontier approach to investigate efficiency of banks operating in the third federal reserve district accounting for the quality and riskiness of bank output in addition to the mean and mode of the conditional distribution of the one sided error term i calculate confidence intervals for the inefficiency measures based on the conditional distribution the results indicate that third district banks are operating at cost efficient output levels and product mixes but are not efficiently using their inputs the second part of the article relates the inefficiency measures to several correlates

policies and institutions in transition economies a political economy perspective on the agri food sector abstract this paper argues that since democratic governments are vulnerable to political pressure they should intervene with policies and institutions only when the net economic benefits exceed the costs incurred through increased political access if governments in transition economies are to exercise control it is important that public institutions within and supporting the agri food sector are designed in such a way as to restrain political incentives in practice this means that they should be built so as to take advantage of inherent scale economies

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

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

productivity and efficiency change and shareholder value evidence from the spanish banking sector productivity change and shareholder value have been analysed in the banking sector in the last few years although it should be noted that these two important aspects have been studied separately in this regard the main contribution of our study is to link these two lines of research by verifying whether those banks characterized by higher levels of efficiency and productivity change have a higher shareholder value to measure changes in efficiency and productivity we use the malmquist nonparametric technique which is calculated from data envelopment analysis dea linear programming approach the malmquist total factor productivity index enables separation of the catching up effect i e changes over time in technical efficiency from technological change i e the shift of best practice frontier over time due to technological progress our results for a sample of listed spanish banks in the period 2000 to 2004 confirm that those banks with higher efficiency and productivity changes have a higher

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

product line deregulation and the cost structure of us savings and loan associations recent legislative actions restrict thrift powers which were broadened by deregulatory actions in the early 1980s using nationwide data for savings and loans s ls evidence is found that these restrictions may rise intermediation costs for s ls by limiting their ability to exploit economies of scope between mortgage related and other outputs in addition economies of scale for a wide size range of s ls are found evidence is also found to suggest that insolvent s ls have higher costs for the same level of outputs than solvent s ls

competition and innovation evidence from financial services abstract this paper presents new evidence on the relationship between competition and innovation by extending previous literature from manufacturing to financial services we introduce a new measure of overall innovation by estimating and enveloping annual minimum cost frontiers to create a global frontier the distance to the global frontier constitutes each bank s technology gap which decreases if the bank manages to innovate our innovation measure enables us to derive and estimate the model of aghion et al 2005b at the firm level for the us banking industry based on individual bank call report data for the period 1984 2004 consistent with theoretical and empirical work by aghion et al we find evidence of an inverted u relationship between competition and innovation that is robust over several different specifications further evidence on major structural changes in the us banking industry indicates that banks moved beyond their optimal innovation level and that interstate banking deregulation resulted in lower bank innovation policy implications to financial reform and prudential regulation are discussed also

appointments pay and performance in uk boardrooms by gender this article uses uk data to examine issues regarding the scarcity of women in boardroom positions the article examines appointments pay and any associated productivity effects deriving from increased diversity evidence of gender bias in the appointment of women as non executive directors is found together with mixed evidence of discrimination in wages or fees paid however the article finds no support for the argument that gender diverse boards enhance corporate performance proposals in favour of greater board diversity may be best structured around the moral value of diversity rather than with reference to an expectation of improved company performance

causes of u s farm commodity programs this paper i s an attempt to explain variations by commodity in producer protection afforded by farm price support programs since the1930s particularly emphasized are theideas that these programs are essentially income redistributional measures and that given political forces the programs are attempts to redistribute efficiently variables associated with the cost to producers of generating political pressure and the social cost deadweight losses of redistribution are both found to be empirically important copyright 1987 by university of chicago press

the pattern of agricultural price distortions in central and eastern europe abstract nominal and adjusted protection rates for nine agricultural commodities in seven central european and three baltic states are estimated for the transition period 1990 1995 our estimates indicate that agricultural and food price distortions differ strongly between central and east european countries between commodities and varied over time the average level of price distortions decreased in 1991 and 1992 after price and trade liberalization but increased again in 1993 as many of these countries reintroduced protectionist price and trade policy measures since 1994 the average level of price distortions has declined again accounting for exchange rate policy effects further reduces estimates of protection of agricultural producers

heads i win tails you lose a career analysis of executive pay and corporate performance the paper utilises a novel career perspective to examine managerial theories of organisational control in the context of executive reward principal agent theory managerial power and neo institutionalism are evaluated detailed career histories of boardroom executives in all ftse350 companies between 1996 and 2008 are utilised using both a fixed effects panel and a career based approach rival hypotheses are tested in addition to the payperformance relationship the probability of job loss as a function of performance is also estimated the evidence presented points to the importance of institutional considerations in the standard agency theory and managerial power perspectives and lends support to a social theory of agency the analysis is empirical in nature and an effort is made to draw on qualitative studies to further flesh out the discussion the practical implications of the findings point to the inadequacy of existing arrangements to deliver efficient pay outcomes where performance is poor whilst highlighting dangers of relying on naive policy remedies that ignore the role played by institutional forces in their implementation also highlighted is the distinct advantage of boards adopting a cumulative or career oriented approach when evaluating executive performance from a policy perspective the case is made for truly long term incentives in the form of career shares

malmquist indices of productivity growth during the deregulation of norwegian banking 1980 89 productivity growth during the deregulation of the norwegian banking industry is studied within the framework of data envelopment analysis which explicitly allows for multiple outputs introducing malmquist indices for productivity growth total growth can be decomposed into frontier growth and change in each bank s distance to the frontier both the total growth index and its components can be consistently chained over time we find productivity regress at the average bank prior to the deregulation but rapid growth when deregulation took place deregulation also led to less dispersion of productivity levels within the industry

the luenberger indicator and productivity growth a note on the european savings banks sector we employ the luenberger productivity indicator to estimate productivity growth and its decomposition into technical change and efficiency change components for savings banks sectors in 10 eu countries between 1996 and 2003 the luenberger indicator requires less restrictive assumptions than standard nonparametric productivity indexes and it allows the assumption of profit maximization to be made for sample firms we estimate average productivity growth in the savings banks sector to be 2 78 per annum and driven almost entirely by technical change whilst the general results confirm earlier findings this study is one of the earliest to identify cross border differences in productivity growth in the savings banks sector

banks responses to deregulation profits technology and efficiency the deregulation of interest rates in the early 1980s raised bank funding costs and lowered profits in response banks raised fees for deposit services reduced branch operating costs and shifted to higher earning assets rates of return did not regain their prederegulation levels until the early 1990s our goal is to decompose the change in bank profits following deregulation into i intemal bank initiated adjustments to the new regulatory structure and ii external contemporaneous changes in banks business environment this decomposition will depend in part on the assumed competitive structure of the banking industry with perfect competition output and input prices are part of the external environment and banks responses are limited to changes in output and input quantities an alternative approach assumes imperfect competition where banks have some control over output prices deposit fees minimum balance requirements and interest rates on certain loans and output quantities and input prices comprise the external environment the altemative model is supported by the data using this model large banks but not smaller banks are found to have relied primarily on changing output prices and input use to mitigate and reverse the negative effects of deregulation on profits the adjustment to deregulation was essentially complete after four years following this additional changes in bank profitability during the late 1980s were primarily due to changes in banks business environment

does bank efficiency matter market value relevance of bank efficiency in australia the stochastic frontier analysis is employed to investigate efficiency of publicly listed australian banks over the period 1985 to 2008 the results suggest that technical cost and profit efficiency of australian banks have improved over time large banks have attained a higher level of cost efficiency but a lower level of technical efficiency compared to small banks no substantial difference between the two groups is found in terms of profit efficiency a panel regression of bank stock return on bank efficiency suggests that an improvement in technical cost or profit efficiency contributes to the market value of a bank thus the shareholder wealth maximization goal is aligned with the goal of maximizing bank efficiency in the australian context

productivity technical and efficiency change in singapore s services sector 2005 to 2008 the current study was motivated by statements made by the economic strategies committee that singapore s recent productivity levels in services were well below countries such as the us japan and hong kong massive employment of foreign workers was cited as the reason for poor productivity levels to shed more light on singapore s falling productivity a nonparametric malmquist productivity index was employed which provides measures of productivity change technical change and efficiency change the findings reveal that growth in total factor productivity tfp was attributed to technical change with no improvement in efficiency change such results suggest that gains from tfp were input driven rather than from a best practice approach such as improvements in operations or better resource allocation

state passage of interstate banking legislation an analysis of firm legislative and economic characteristics abstract forty nine states and the district of columbia enacted legislation reducing interstate banking restrictions between july 1982 and april 1993 for these 50 banking bills deregulation increased the average price of bank stocks returns vary cross sectionally by firm characteristics regulatory features and economic conditions returns are positively related to the characteristics of acquisition targets furthermore returns are positively related to legislative features that increase the bargaining power of potential targets and economic conditions that are likely to encourage bank acquisition these findings are consistent with the relaxation of geographic restrictions increasing activity in the corporate control market

outside offers and the gender pay gap empirical evidence from the uk academic labour market using a unique data source on academic economist labour market experiences we explore gender pay and promotions in addition to earnings and productivity measures we have information on outside offers and perceptions of discrimination we find both a gender promotions gap and a within rank gender pay gap a driving factor may be outside offers men receive more outside offers than women of comparable characteristics and gain higher pay increases in response this may arise due to discrimination we find that perceptions of discrimination and also outside job applications correlate with an individual receiving earnings below that expected given their characteristics

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

bending the pipeline executive search and gender inequality in hiring for top management jobs we study the sources of women s underrepresentation in hiring for top management jobs by focusing on the context of executive search using data that include proprietary information on 10 970 individuals considered by a search firm we examine the sources of the low proportion of women placed in senior roles contrary to received wisdom we find limited evidence that demand side screeners strongly contribute to gender disadvantage in this setting what gender differences exist tend to play out at the start of the hiring process and are driven both by supply side and demand side actors once considered for a position women are no less likely than men to be hired though they are slightly less likely to be interviewed by the search firm our findings highlight the theoretical importance of disentangling candidates self steering behavior from the pipeline bending of hiring agents we discuss the implications of our results for understanding gender inequality at upper echelons of the labor market this p

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

international comparison of bank production characteristics and technological change in this paper we conduct an international comparison of bank production and technological characteristics the comparison is performed using novel evidence on changes in labour demand over the period 1980 89 for banks headquartered in canada france west germany italy japan and the united states the results suggest that there is relatively low substitutability of labour for capital in the production process of these banking organizations significant scale economies were found with regards to the expansion of output and the concomitant increase in labour in addition technological change operated to lower the quantity of inputs needed to produce a given level of outputs and increased the minimum efficient size bank over the sample period many of the production characteristics and technology effects varied significantly across countries these findings imply that intercountry differences in production characteristics and technological change should be explicitly recognized in bank strategic planning

explaining price policy bias in agriculture the calculus of support maximizing politicians a model is developed to explain observed patterns of policy intervention in agriculture we analyze the interaction between political support seeking politicians and supportsupplying citizens society consists of a rural and urban group we determine the effects on transfers of relative group size disparities in income endowments between groups and the deadweight loss of redistribution the framework advanced is an alternative to that of the interest group model and is used to explain for example why the export sectors in developing countries are taxed more and why the united kingdom is less adamant for higher price supports than germany

new market power models and sex differences in pay in the context of certain models it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage we use this strategy to estimate the elasticity of labor supply for men and women workers at a chain of grocery stores identifying separation elasticities from differences in wages and separation rates across different job titles within the firm we estimate that women have lower elasticities so a robinson style monopsony model can explain reasonably well the lower relative pay of women in the retail grocery industry

a nonparametric approach for assessing productivity dynamics of large u s banks the 1980s marked an era of substantial change for the us commercial banking industry an issue of considerable interest to banking analysts and economists alike is whether the intensified competitive pressure generated by deregulation and notable financial innovations enhanced productivity to investigate the response to these changes the non parametric malmquist index is used to evaluate productivity dynamics a statistically significant productivity surge found between 1983 and 1984 is followed by productivity regress the next period post 1985 sustained productivity progress is observed for the remainder of the decade productivity movements are primarily attributable to technological changes rather than scale changes or convergence to the production frontier

deregulation and productivity decline the case of spanish savings banks abstract during the 1980s many regulatory constraints limiting competition in spanish banking were relaxed or removed although deregulation came later to savings banks than to the rest of the banking sector two consequences of partial deregulation of savings banks have been a rapid growth in branching activity much of it geographically dispersed and a burst of merger activity in this paper we investigate productive efficiency and total factor productivity change in spanish savings banks over the 1986 1991 post deregulation period neither branching nor mergers provide an adequate explanation for the magnitude or the nature of the productivity decline we observe over the period

male female wage differentials in job ladders much of the male female wage differential exists because men and women are assigned to different jobs within narrow job categories there is no male female differential only a tortured taste theory of discrimination can reconcile these facts we argue that differential movement along job ladders entails comparative advantage so the ability standard for promotion is higher for women this implies that more able women will be passed over in favor of less able men women assumed to have the same ability distribution as men earn less the differential reflects females lower promotion probability not within job discrimination

the changing of the boards the impact on firm valuation of mandated female board representation in 2003 a new law required that 40 of norwegian firms directors be women at the time only 9 of directors were women we use the prequota cross sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota we find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in tobin s q over the following years consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value the quota led to younger and less experienced boards increases in leverage and acquisitions and deterioration in operating performance copyright 2012 oxford university press

deregulation technological change and the business lending performance of large and small banks according to deyoung et al journal of financial services research 2004 deregulation and technological change has divided the us banking industryinto two primarysize based groups verylarge banks specializing in the use of hard information to make standardized loans and smaller banks specializing in the use of soft information and relationship development to make non standardized loans we evaluate business lending performance for small and large banks over the 1993 2001 period small business lending bysmall banks is characterized byrelationship development and non standardized loans consistent with deyoung et al s model we find that after controlling for market concentration cost of funds and a variety of other factors that might influence yields smaller banks perform better than larger banks in the small business lending market however larger banks appear to have the advantage in credit card lending a market characterized byimpersonal relationships and standardized loans interestingly we find evidence that larger banks have been making inroads in the market for the smallest business loans a result consistent with the use of credit scoring bylarge banks to make

a positive theory of agricultural protection the present paper analyses the political economy of agricultural protection in a general equilibrium framework rational politicians offer protectionist policies in return for political support from their constituency individuals in the economy have different factor endowments politicians exploit these differences in establishing redistributive policies when maximizing political support changes in economic variables such as the urban rural income gap capital intensity the share of agriculture in total output and total employment and the share of food in consumer expenditures affect the political equilibrium policy the analysis concludes that the observed correlation between economic development and agricultural protection is caused by a multiplicity of factors

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

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