labor supply in the presence of taxes an alternative specification this paper estimates a model of married women s labor supply in the presence of progressive taxes the specification is based on a translog indirect utility function with normally distributed random preference parameters the application of roy s identity then leads to a distribution of labor supply that involves ratios of normals

household labor supply and welfare participation in sweden using a sample of swedish households we estimate a household labor supply model assuming that preferences for consumption and leisure can be described by a direct translog utility function the labor supply and welfare participation decisions are treated as a discrete choice problem and we assume that these choices follow a simple conditional logit rule in addition we allow unobserved individual specific effects to be correlated across alternatives we assume that these unobserved effects are drawn from a discrete distribution and the correlation across alternatives is modeled using factor loading techniques classification error in hours is allowed for by using a multiplicative measurement error specification the estimates from the structural model yield inelastic labor supply among husbands and positive wage elasticity for wives further the cross elasticities are close to zero

wealth and portfolio composition theory and evidence we examine a survey of 6010 u s households and estimate a model for household portfolio allocation we extend the conventional portfolio choice model in order to capture the observed incompleteness of household portfolios we show that the empirical specification of the joint discrete and continuous choice that characterizes household portfolio behavior is a switching regressions model with endogenous switching we go on to examine the impact of taxes on portfolio composition using detailed survey data to calculate precisely the marginal tax rate facing each household finally we estimate wealth elasticities of demand for a range of assets and liabilities

the effect of income taxation on labor supply in the united states the effect of income taxation on the labor supply of prime age married men and women in the united states is examined using econometric methods similar to those used in the influential work of jerry hausman male labor supply is found to be relatively invariant to the net wage and virtual income in all specifications estimated the estimated impact of taxation on the labor supply of married women depends critically on the method used to estimate the labor supply function estimated net wage and virtual income elasticities are considerably larger when data on nonparticipants are included than when the estimation is conducted conditional on hours being greater than zero

financial liberalization financial regulation and bank efficiency a multi country analysis this article investigates the impact of financial reforms on bank efficiency more specifically we distinguish between two different types of financial reforms i e financial liberalization measures and measures of the quality of bank regulation and supervision i e financial regulation and study their relationship to bank efficiency separately moreover we analyse whether the impact of financial liberalization on bank efficiency is conditional on the quality of regulation and supervision of the banking system we apply stochastic frontier analysis to calculate bank efficiency at the individual bank level and use a new and detailed database that measures different aspects of financial reforms the data set consists of 87 312 bank year observations covering 61 countries for the period 1996 2005 overall we show that the impact of financial liberalization policies on bank efficiency is conditional on the extent to which bank regulation and supervision has been adopted and developed

independence of irrelevant alternatives and revealed group preferences it is shown that a pareto optimal and continuous single valued choice function defined on the compact convex subsets of the positive orthant of the n dimensional euclidean space maximizes a real valued function if and only if it satisfies the independence of irrelevant alternatives condition if n 2 and the strong axiom of revealed preference otherwise the results can be applied to consumer demand theory to deal with nonlinear budget sets and to bargaining game theory to generalize the nash bargaining solution

microeconometric analysis of residential water demand this paper develops a structural model for obtaining price elasticities and evaluating consumer s response to changes in nonlinear tariffs when only panel data on household consumption are available the model and the empirical strategy address problems implied by nonlinear tariffs existence of a fixed cost and use of limited data giving rise to a random effects model with a nonlinear individual effect results show that the estimated model does well at fitting data and demand is inelastic although elasticity varies by initial consumption block then i estimate welfare consequences of implementing several demand policies

distance constraints the limits of foreign lending in poor economies how far does mobility of multinational banks solve problems of financial development using a panel of 80 000 loans over 7 years i show that greater cultural and geographical distance between a foreign bank s headquarters and local branches leads it to further avoid lending to informationally difficult yet fundamentally sound firms requiring relational contracting greater distance also makes them less likely to bilaterally renegotiate and less successful at recovering defaults differences in bank size legal institutions risk preferences or unobserved borrower heterogeneity cannot explain these results these distance constraints can be large enough to permanently exclude certain sectors of the economy from financing by foreign banks

nonparametric estimation of the impact of taxes on female labor supply this paper proposes a simple extension of nonparametric estimation methods for nonlinear budget set models derived in blomquist and newey 2002 to censored dependent variables the nonparametric method is applied to estimate female labor supply elasticities using data on married women from the 1985 and 1989 waves of the panel study of income dynamics exploiting the substantial variation in budget sets caused by the tax reform act of 1986 as a source of identification the estimated wage elasticities from this new method are 0 56 overall and 0 27 on the intensive margin the income elasticity estimates are close to 0 67 overall and 0 13 on the intensive margin compared with the linear labor supply model the estimated elasticities are usually larger for the nonparametric specifications that account for nonlinear budget sets copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

the effect of income taxation on the labor supply of married men in sweden abstract this paper presents labor supply functions estimated on a sample of prime age swedish males the model used takes account of the nonlinear character of individuals budget sets caused by the progressive income tax it also allows preferences to vary between individuals calculations with the estimated functions using a partial equilibrium framework indicate a sizeable effect of the income tax on hours of work the average expected deadweight loss of the income tax is found to be approximately 20 percent of tax revenue

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

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

trade liberalization macroeconomic fluctuations and contingent protection in latin america the main purpose of this paper is to analyze the main determinants of antidumping actions in latin america from a policy perspective it would be interesting to know whether the application of trade remedy instruments was associated with episodes of a depressed level of economic activity or real exchange rate appreciations or both these developments favor the finding of industry injury and dumping practices making the case for antidumping more justifiable an alternative hypothesis is that antidumping measures have been erected simply as replacements for formal tariff protection so that there should be a negative relationship between antidumping measures and tariff levels moreover antidumping actions may be associated less with macroeconomic variables affecting injury and dumping and more with political economy type variables such as industry concentration the main purpose of this study is to investigate these hypotheses employing a very detailed database for the three main antidumping countries in latin america argentina brazil and mexico we find support for the hypothesis that in these countries contingent protection has been employed to protect domestic industries in times of macroeconomic hardship in particular real exchange rate appreciations and sluggish gdp growth is associated with increasing antidumping actions the estimated quantitative impact seems quite significant on average a real appreciation of 25 percent raises expected antidumping initiations by about 20 percent also a 4 percentage point decline in gdp raises expected antidumping activity by 27 percent besides these macrodeterminants we also investigate whether antidumping actions were established to replace protection given by regular tariffs or whether they were affected by political economy variables such as industry concentration we find some evidence consistent with the first proposition but not with the second

productivity and efficiency dynamics in indian banking an input distance function approach incorporating quality of inputs and outputs summary banking technology is typically characterized by multiple inputs and multiple outputs that are associated with various attributes such as different types of deposits loans number of accounts classes of employees and location of branches these quality differentials in inputs and outputs are mostly ignored in empirical studies these omissions make the practical value of productivity studies in organizations like banks questionable because quality is a key component of performance this paper proposes using hedonic aggregator functions as a tool of aggregating inputs and outputs with quality attributes within an input distance function framework and analyzes the impact of banking deregulation on efficiency and total factor productivity tfp change in the indian banking industry using panel data for the period 1996 2005 empirical results indicate that banks have improved their efficiency from 61 in 1996 to 72 in 2005 during the post deregulation period and the gain in efficiency of state owned banks has surpassed that of private banks improvement in capital base as indicated by increased capital adequacy ratio played an important role in ushering efficiency gain the return to scale estimate suggests that state owned banks are operating far above their efficient scale and cost savings can be obtained by reducing their size of operations overall tfp growth was above 3 5 annually both technical progress and technical efficiency change consistently played an important role in shaping tfp growth copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

bank ownership privatization and performance evidence from a transition country abstract this paper combines the static effect of ownership and the dynamic effect of privatization on bank performance in china over 1995 2010 reporting a significantly higher performance by private intermediaries joint stock commercial banks and city commercial banks relative to state owned commercial banks however publicly traded banks subject to multiple monitoring and vetting in capital markets perform better regardless of ownership status the privatization of banks has improved performance with respect to revenue inflow and efficiency gains in the short or long run initial public offerings the positive long run effect is more relevant and significant for banking institutions with minority foreign ownership moreover this paper innovatively estimates interest income efficiency and non interest income efficiency at the same time the results suggest that chinese banks are much more efficient in generating interest income than raising non interest revenue although the latter aspect has improved significantly during the sample period

the ces utility function non linear budget constraints and labour supply results on female participation and hours the most recent efforts in the study of labour supply decisions have concentrated on the estimation of explicit utility indices as a means to overcome the specification and endogeneity problems created by non linear budget constraints the presence of non convexities and the interest in making welfare comparisons between individuals are additional reasons that make the use of explicit utility functions in either direct or indirect form an essential requirement for labour supply studies it is therefore important to consider carefully the available possibilities from a utility index we want flexibility and ease of estimation the stonegeary function has proved its relative worth in consumption studies but its performance has been disappointing when leisure is incorporated into the set of commodities abbot and ashenfelter i976 found that for part of their sample estimated available time was less than hours worked and these results have pervasively reappeared in subsequent studies using this function hausman i980 has recently proposed a utility function which yields a linear hours function this is an important contribution which facilitates the task of estimation enormously this paper argues that the ces utility function despite not generating a linear hours function is also very convenient for estimation purposes in fact it is shown below that to estimate the parameters of the utility function there is no need whatsoever for any explicit hours function labour supply responses by married women have been previously estimated with british data but none of the available results has taken full account of the joint decision on participation and hours and of the non linear shape of the budget constraint that the tax system generates layard et al i980 consider the joint decision in their estimation procedure but ignore the tax system greenhalgh i980 takes into account the non linearity of the budget constraint but estimates labour supply responses by a method which treats participation and hours of work as separate and independent decisions in the present paper on the other hand using an explicit utility index we propose an estimation method which takes into account both the tax system and the joint hours participation decision

privatization matters bank efficiency in transition countries abstract to investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries namely bulgaria the czech republic croatia hungary poland and romania income and balance sheet characteristics and efficiency measures computed from stochastic frontiers are compared across four bank ownership types our empirical results support the hypotheses that foreign owned banks are most efficient and government owned banks are least efficient in addition the importance of attracting a strategic foreign owner in the privatization process is confirmed however counter to the conjecture that foreign banks cherry pick the most profitable opportunities we find that domestic banks have a local advantage in pursuing fee for service business finally we show that both the method and the timing of privatization matter to performance specifically voucher privatization does not lead to increased efficiency and early privatized banks are more efficient than later privatized banks even though we find no evidence of a selection effect

the impact of regulatory reforms on cost structure ownership and competition in indian banking this paper evaluates the impact of financial sector reforms on the cost structure characteristics and on the ownership cost efficiency relationship in indian banking it also examines the impact of reforms on the dynamics of competition in the lending market we find evidence that deregulation improves banks performance and fosters competition in the lending market results suggest technological progress once indian commercial banks have adjusted to the new regulatory environment this however does not translate in efficiency gains there is also evidence of an ownership effect on the level and pattern of efficiency change finally competition keeps building pace even in the re regulation period and technological improvements are not hampered by the tightening of prudential norms

banking deregulation and allocative efficiency in pakistan abstractthis article examines the impact of deregulation policies on allocative efficiency of banks in pakistan it investigates whether deregulation has impacted the pattern of allocative efficiency of banks and explores which bank ownership segment has been more responsive it uses data from 1991 to 2005 and explicitly models allocative inefficiency by using the translog shadow cost share system empirical results show that overregulation and imperfect market structure hampers the ability of banks to make competitive decisions we find evidence of allocative inefficiency leading to over utilization of labour and deposits vis a vis operating cost empirical results for time varying allocative efficiency show declining levels of allocative inefficiency for state owned and private banks in post reform period deregulation policies induce state owned banks to decrease over utilization of labour relative to deposits and operating cost while private banks succeed in using operating cost closer to optimal leve

price knowledge in household demand for utility services a household s decision to acquire price knowledge is endogenous in the demand for utility services and may affect elasticities and consumption levels a simultaneous equation model with endogenous switching is developed to evaluate the effects of price knowledge and other sources of heterogeneity results indicate informed households were more responsive to average and marginal price signals informed households also use less water but this is due to heterogeneity rather than price knowledge controlling for heterogeneity price knowledge actually increases monthly water usage the implications of accounting for differences in price knowledge in utility demand modeling and demand management policy are discussed

do government owned banks trade market power for slack the quiet life hypothesis qlh posits that banks with market power have less incentives to maximize revenues and minimize cost especially government owned banks with a public mandate precluding profit maximization might succumb to a quiet life we use a unified approach that simultaneously measures market power and efficiency to test the quiet life hypothesis of german savings banks we find that average local market power declined between 1996 and 2006 cost and profit efficiency remained constant nonparametric correlations are consistent with a quiet life regarding cost efficiency but not regarding profit efficiency the quiet life on the cost side is negatively correlated with bank size quality of loan portfolio and local per capita income the last result indicates that the quiet cost life is therefore potentially due to benevolent excess consumption of local input factors by public savings banks

constant increasing and decreasing risk aversion with many commodities the arrow 1971 pratt 1964 theory of risk aversion has achieved important successes in the study of economic responses to risk this theory applies to a special class of cases in which the von neumann morgenstern expected utility hypothesis is used to explain these responses under this hypothesis individuals who maximize the expected utility of different utility functions will in general make different choices in the face of uncertainty for the purpose of predicting which of two different utility functions will lead to locally more risk averse economic behaviour the essential feature of these functions is their associated arrow pratt absolute risk aversion measures in fact the local comparisons can be extended to global comparisons if the arrow pratt absolute measures are uniformly comparable the arrow pratt measure of absolute risk aversion and a closely related measure of relative risk aversion also play crucial roles in the investigation of changes induced by wealth increases in the risk taking behaviour of a single expected utility maximizing individual this study has resulted in a satisfactory theory of increasing decreasing and constant absolute and relative risk aversion the special cases to which the arrow pratt theory is directly applicable are those in which the utility functions in question are functions of a single variable e g wealth unfortunately the models required to explain many economic decisions employ a version of the expected utility hypothesis in which the argument of the utility function is a multidimensional vector one example arises in the study of the consumption savings decision another occurs in the analysis of the combined consumption savings portfolio decision a final example is obtained in the investigation of demand for goods of uncertain quality the papers of kihlstrom mirman 1974 and diamond stiglitz 1974 have suggested a partial generalization of the arrow pratt theory of absolute risk aversion this

estimating the value of an in kind transfer the case of food stamps the value of one in kind transfer food stamps is estimated by evaluating the experience of an actual conversion from stamps to cash in puerto rico in 1982 the evidence indicates that the cashout of the stamps had no detectable influence on food expenditures the explanation partly lies in the distribution of expenditures for the stamps were inframarginal for most recipients however some evidence indicates that trafficking in stamps was widespread as well including indirect evidence from estimation of the piecewise linear constraint model copyright 1989 by the econometric society

family labor supply with taxes over the period 1960 1983 the proportion of federal tax revenue raised by taxation of labor supply has risen from 57 77 percent in this paper we specify and estimate a model of family labor supply which treats both federal and state taxation husbands and wives labor supply are treated jointly rather than in aseparate manner as in previous research a method to calculate the virtual wage for nonworking spouses is used within a utility maximizing framework to treat correctly the joint family labor supply decision joint family efforts are found to be important the efficiency cost deadweight loss of labor taxation is estimated to be 29 6 of tax revenue raised the effect of the new 10 deduction to ease the marriage tax for working spouses leads to a prediction of 3 8 increase in wives labor supply and a 9 decrease in husbands labor supply overall taxes paid are predicted to decrease by 3 4 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the rand health insurance experiment three decades later we re present and re examine the analysis from the famous rand health insurance experiment from the 1970s on the impact of consumer cost sharing in health insurance on medical spending we begin by summarizing the experiment and its core findings in a manner that would be standard in the current age we then examine potential threats to the validity of a causal interpretation of the experimental treatment effects stemming from different study participation and differential reporting of outcomes across treatment arms finally we re consider the famous rand estimate that the elasticity of medical spending with respect to its out of pocket price is 0 2 emphasizing the challenges associated with summarizing the experimental treatment effects from non linear health insurance contracts using a single price elasticity

the econometrics of piecewise linear budget constraints a survey and exposition of the maximum likelihood method in this article maximum likelihood techniques for estimating consumer demand functions when budget constraints are piecewise linear are exposited and surveyed consumer demand functions are formally derived under such constraints and it is shown that the functions are themselves nonlinear as a result the econometric problems in estimating such functions are exposited and the importance of the stochastic specification is stressed in particular the specification of both unobserved heterogeneity of preferences and measurement error econometric issues in estimation and testing are discussed and the results of the studies that have been conducted to date are surveyed

estimating demand elasticities using nonlinear pricing abstract nonlinear pricing is prevalent in industries such as health care public utilities and telecommunications however this pricing scheme introduces bias into estimating elasticities for welfare analysis or policy changes i develop a local elasticity estimation method that uses nonlinear price schedules to isolate consumers expenditure choices from selection and simultaneity biases this method improves over previous approaches by using commonly available observational data and requiring only a single general monotonicity assumption using claims level data on health insurance with two nonlinearities i am able to measure two separate elasticities and find that elasticity declines from 0 26 to 0 09 by the second nonlinearity these estimates are then used to calculate moral hazard deadweight loss this method enables estimation of many policies with nonlinear pricing which previous tools could not address

charitable donations by uk households evidence from the family expenditure survey this paper reports estimates based on both standard tobit and generalized tobit techniques of the determinants of charitable giving in the uk using 1984 family expenditure survey data this is the first such study using uk data separate estimates are presented of the determinants of participation and of the level of donations by giving households participation is seen to be sensitive to income the tax price of giving and a range of demographic variables while the level of donations varies primarily with income donations are found to be inelastic with respect to changes in disposable income

female labor supply with a discontinuous nonconvex budget constraint incorporation of a part time full time wage differential this paper incorporates the well documented part time full time wage differential into an empirical labor supply model with both a heterogeneity and a random error term and estimates that model fo

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

structural estimation of family labor supply with taxes estimating a continuous hours model using a direct utility specification this paper proposes a new method for estimating family labor supply in the presence of taxes this method accounts for continuous hours choices measurement error unobserved heterogeneity in tastes for work the nonlinear form of the tax code and fixed costs of work in one comprehensive specification estimated on data from the 2001 psid the resulting elasticities for married males are consistent with those found elsewhere in the literature but female wage elasticities are substantially smaller than those found in most of the literature simulations of recent tax acts predict small effects on the labor supply of married couples

tax reform and housing demand the distribution of welfare gains and losses abstract we study distributional effects of a recent reform of the swedish system of income taxation which affects the price of owner occupied housing in calculating the welfare effects we account both for the non linearities of the income tax schedule and the dichotomous choice aspect of housing demand to own or to rent small and rosen 1981 have shown how the standard harberger type approximation formulae can be adapted to handle discrete choices and we modify their analysis for a non linear budget constraint

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

quantity constrained household responses to ui reform this paper explores the consequences of adopting a household perspective when evaluating proposals for the reform of the canadian unemployment insurance system a model of joint behavior that allows demand side constraints to limit labor supply choices is estimated quantity constraints faced by one spouse are thus important determinants of the other s behavior predicted household responses to unemployment insurance reform proposals are negligible and differ from those that would be obtained using a model of unconstrained individual behavior copyright 1990 by royal economic society

the econometrics of nonlinear budget sets traditional empirical analysis of consumer demand has usually made the assumption of linear budget sets that is the consumer is assumed to purchase any desired quantity at a constant price subject to a budget constraint the major exception to this framework is the analysis of demand when some goods are rationed 2 in the rationed case the price is constant up to a quantity limit in contrast to the rationed case here i consider the situation where the price varies with the amount of the good purchased empirical situations with nonconstant prices come readily to mind and of course they have received much recent attention from theorists since mirrlees 44 paper on optimal nonlinear taxation the following examples are meant to give a partial listing of cases when nonlinear budget sets occur i electricity prices many electric utilities engage in declining block pricing that is the marginal price of successive kwh s of electricity decrease at a given number of points determined by total demand thus the budget set is piecewise linear houthakker 36 was the first to propose an approach to this problem taylor 51 analyzes the problem at length and hausman kinnucin and mcfadden 31 use an instrumental variables estimator to provide consistent estimates of the demand function

economies of scale technical change and persistent and time varying cost efficiency in indian banking do ownership regulation and heterogeneity matter abstract banks with different ownership types adjust differently to changes in regulatory environments although this topic has been widely studied all the previous studies fail to control for bank heterogeneity bank specific effects in estimating cost structure and efficiency we propose a model where we control for bank heterogeneity and introduce persistent and time varying inefficiency additionally we incorporate determinants of both persistent and time varying inefficiency as well as production risks furthermore our model allows estimation of different technologies for different ownership types jointly we use this model to analyze the effect of regulation in indian banking we find that private banks have not exhausted their economies of scale foreign banks are operating under diseconomies of scale especially after the reforms and scale economies of state owned banks are unaffected by regulation banks of all ownership types have enjoyed technical progress however foreign banks have benefited the most followed by state owned banks only state banks were able to improve their cost efficiency while private banks and especially foreign banks were lagging behind their cost frontiers

impact of financial reforms on efficiency of state owned private and foreign banks in pakistan this article uses a unique bank level data from 1991 to 2000 and evaluates how financial reforms affect banking efficiency of domestic and foreign banks in pakistan the results suggest that banking efficiency falls during initial reform period when banks adjust to enhanced competition but increases in more advanced stages of reform while in general foreign and private banks show superior efficiency and factor productivity than do state owned banks the relative performance of foreign banks worsens after the consolidation stage of the financial reforms is over we show the importance of link between bank size asset quality and bank branches with efficiency indexes and also note that every 10 increase in share of nonperforming to total loans decreases banking efficiency by 6 to 10

income effects and physician labour supply evidence from the threshold system in ontario we examine a reform to the physician threshold system in ontario that provides a unique opportunity to assess the effect of fee changes on physician behaviour free from the biases that potentially affect simple time series or cross section inference we find that 1 the income effects of fee changes are small but significant 2 the income effect dominates the substitution effect only for a minority of services with relatively low prices and high volumes and 3 the cross effects of fee changes tend to be significant only for services with relatively high prices and low volumes une reforme du systeme des seuils de revenus au dela desquels les medecins sont penalises a fourni une occasion en or de mesurer l effet des changements de revenus sur le comportement du medecin en evitant les biais qui potentiellement vicient les resultats derives des series chronologiques ou des analyses transversales on decouvre que 1 les effets de revenus des changements de remuneration sont faibles mais significatifs 2 l effet de revenu domine l effet de substitution seulement pour un petit nombre de services a faible prix et fort volume et 3 les effets croises des changements de remuneration tendent aetre significatifs seulement pour les services dont le prix est relativement eleve et ou il y a faible volume

welfare and distribution effects of water pricing policies in this paper distribution and welfare effects of changes in block price systems are evaluated a method is discussed to determine for a marshallian demand function equivalent variation in case of a block price system the method is applied to compare for the metropolitan region of sao paulo alternative pricing policies on the basis of their demand welfare and distribution effects of changing water prices results show that there is a trade off between average welfare and income distribution a pro poor price system may result in lower average welfare than a flat price system but in higher individual welfare for the poor moreover there is a trade off between revenues for the water company and income distribution even though pro poor price systems may not be as good for average welfare as flat price systems their direct effects on poverty are important introducing pro poor price systems however may have financial consequences for the water companies

enjoying the quiet life under deregulation not quite summary most empirical studies in the banking literature assume that the alternative profit function is linearly homogeneous in input prices we show that such an assumption is theoretically unwarranted and that its use may yield misleading results we use koetter et al review of economics and statistics 2012 94 2 462 480 as a benchmark to showcase how empirical results can be sensitive to the linear homogeneity assumption contrary to koetter et al we find a positive relation between market power and profit efficiency when this assumption is dropped this relation is slightly weakened after the wave of intrastate and interstate deregulation but not enough to support the quiet life hypothesis copyright 2014 john wiley sons ltd

determinants of voluntary overtime decisions determinants of voluntary overtime decisions i introduction since the passage of the fair labor standards act in 1938 the minimum legal overtime pay premium has remained time and one half for persons working more than forty hours per week in 1978 approximately 59 percent of the labor force was subject to this provision and coverage has not changed since then 1 the labor market effects of overtime provisions including the decision on the part of both employers and employees to utilize overtime has generated a great deal of intellectual debate for example union groups have long stressed the importance of raising the legal minimum premium in order to stimulat employment through a substitution of additional employees for longer e g overtime hours previous research by ehrenberg and schumann 1982 has estimated that these effects are likely to be quite small to date studies of overtime behavior such as ehrenberg 1971a have focused on the decisions of employers implicit in these studies is the assumption of a perfectly elastic supply response by the employee to employer overtime policy however just as employers attempt to minimize costs in demanding overtime hours taking into account quasi fixed labor costs in addition to overtime premiums employees attempt to maximize utility in supplying overtime hours from the worker s perspective the decision to work overtime and perhaps more generally to take a job where overtime is regularly available or required can be thought of as resulting from a comparison of the utility derived from an overtime versus a no overtime state within this framework the voluntary overtime decision depends on relative wages overtime to straight time and nonlabor income and will be strongly conditioned on such personal factors as the worker s marital status and age this study attempts to advance our knowledge of the labor market effects of overtime policies by explicitly modelling employee responses to variations in the legal parameters of the overtime system 2 our model allows us to estimate substitution and income elasticities for overtime and thereby enables us to evaluate the effects of a variety of policies on a worker s voluntary overtime decision policy simulations suggest that legislative changes to increase the overtime premium or reduce the number of hours after which the mandatory premium takes effect would induce greater voluntary overtime on the part of worker yet because of offsetting income and substitution effects the net induced effects of such policies are not quantitatively large we also find that mandatory overtime provisions are most likely to be found in settings where quasi fixed employment costs are highest the remainder of this paper is organized as follows section ii develops a theoretical model of the voluntary overtime decision section iii presents the empirical model to be estimated section iv discusses the data used in estimation and the construction of key variables section v presents the empirical findings section vi reports the results of a simulation analysis of the effects of a number of policy alternatives on the voluntary overtime decision section vii investigates the sensitivity of the policy simulations to the empirical specification finally section viii summarizes the major conclusions and gives suggestions for further research ii the voluntary overtime decision the voluntary overtime decision can be though of as resulting from a straightforward maximization of utility subject to a budget constraint consider a worker who possesses a monotonic strictly quasi concave utility function in market goods income and labor supply u y h where y is income and h is hours of work the budget constraint facing the worker is y wh n where w is the net of taxes wage rate and n is net nonwage income to make the problem empirically tractable we utilize the stone geary utility function in this paper

social interactions and habit formation in a model of female labour supply this paper investigates the influence of habit formation and preference interdependence on labour supply behaviour of married females a novelty of the paper is that we incorporate direct survey information on reference groups of individuals in a neoclassical labour supply model for that purpose we first estimate a latent variables model relating the direct information to the true but unobserved reference groups one of the most interesting features of the model is that the presence of young children becomes an insignificant factor in the hours equation while it remains a significant factor in the participation decision in addition the labour supply curve is much flatter in a model with habit formation and preference interdependence than in a model without it both habit formation and preference interdependence contribute significantly to the explanation of female labour supply 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

privatization as an agency problem auctions versus private negotiations abstract this paper investigates the design of privatization mechanisms in emerging market economies characterized by political constraints that limit the set of viable privatization options our objective is to explain the striking diversity of mechanisms observed in practice and the frequent use of an apparently sub optimal privatization mechanism private negotiations we develop a simple model in which privatization is to be carried out by a government agent who plays favorites among bidders but is potentially disciplined by losing his private benefits of staying in office if the political environment is such that the privatization agent himself aims at raising the fair value for the company then privatization auctions and private negotiations are equally successful in raising public revenues if however political considerations distort the agent s incentives it may be that a seemingly transparent auction will raise less revenue than opaque private negotiations we also show that information disclosure laws may have negative welfare implications they may help the privatization agent to collude with some of the bidders to the disadvantage of non colluding bidders

commercial bank ownership and performance in china this study examines the determinants of bank performance based on proxy variables that assess the quality of assets profitability liquidity and overall performance using a sample of 111 chinese commercial banks over the period of 2000 2012 we find that foreign banks appear to have better asset quality and overall performance although lower profitability compared to domestic banks in contrast the state owned banks tend to be more profitable and have better liquidity position compared with other domestic banks and foreign banks at bank level equity liability ratio exerts significant influence on overall bank performance while at the macroeconomic level per capital gdp gdp growth inflation and unemployment rates appear to have a bearing on bank performance

financial sector liberalization bank privatization and efficiency evidence from pakistan abstract the pakistani banking system has been transformed over the past 15 years through liberalization the entry of private banks the privatization of public sector banks and the tightening of prudential regulations the effects of these changes on bank productivity and relative efficiency are investigated using various techniques bank productivity in terms of profits has increased and new entrants have been efficient but the dispersion of efficiency remains wide the privatized banks improved their profit efficiency in the period immediately following their privatization but in the subsequent years only one significantly improved its efficiency whereas the other did not differentiate itself in terms of efficiency from the remaining state owned banks the new private domestic banks generally proved to be among the most efficient and sometimes out performed the foreign banks

the effects of deregulation on the performance of financial institutions the case of spanish savings banks this paper examines the impact of regulatory reform on the performance of spanish savings banks the focus is whether increased competition brought on by deregulation affected performance of banks over time output technical efficiency which is defined in terms of the production possibility frontier is also examined empirical results show declining levels of output technical efficiency along with a significantly high rate of technical progress in spite of declining technical efficiency during this period evidence of an increasing trend in productivity growth is found

a consistent semiparametric estimation of the consumer surplus distribution abstract in this paper we examine the consequences of demand function heterogeneity for the estimation of the consumer surplus in particular we show that given a linear demand function with random coefficients one can consistently estimate the consumer surplus distribution without making parametric assumptions about the coefficient distribution the approach is illustrated using data on gasoline consumption

the impact of financial liberalization on bank efficiency evidence from latin america and asia this article investigates the impact of financial liberalization on bank efficiency using data for a sample of over 4000 bank year observations from ten emerging economies for the period 1991 2000 we use data envelopment analysis dea to calculate bank efficiency at the individual bank level bank efficiency measures are then aggregated at the country level to investigate the relationship between financial liberalization and bank efficiency using a panel least square fixed effects model overall we find strong support for the positive impact of financial liberalization programmes on bank efficiency

trends in efficiency in response to regulatory reforms the case of indian and pakistani commercial banks this paper attempts to estimate trends in the efficiency levels of indian and pakistani commercial banks between 1985 and 2003 a time period which encompasses two phases of significant change to the regulation of the financial sector in both countries our efficiency estimates show that during the initial years of the post reform period a reduction in efficiency is observed for banks in both countries however efficiency levels were found to have increased subsequently suggesting a period of initial adjustment throughout much of the 1990s followed by a subsequent correction in the latter part of the sample period

testing the behavior of rationally inattentive consumers in a residential water market abstract rationally inattentive consumers tend to apply simplified heuristics when making decisions we test the hypothesis of rational inattention in the context of residential water usage where water bills typically account for a small fraction of household expenditures and only attract casual attention we begin by rigorously testing whether or not residential water customers exhibit evidence of rational inattention we then propose a heuristic water demand model to explore the decision making of rationally inattentive consumers and validate the model by comparing the model with the discrete continuous choice model on attentive and fully informed decision makers in out of sample predictions