x efficiency in australian banking an empirical investigation this paper empirically investigates the x eaciency technical and allocative in australian banks a non parametric method of data envelopment analysis dea has been used to arrive at the eaciency scores banks in this sample were found to have low levels of overall eaciency compared with the banks in the european countries and in the us the results indicate that as a source of overall ineaciency the technical component was more important than the allocative component thus the ineaciency in australian banks can be attributed to wasting of inputs technical ineaciency rather than choosing the incorrect input combinations allocative ineaciency domestic banks were found to be more eacient than foreign owned banks the study has important implications such as guiding the government policy regarding deregulation and mergers since the study pinpoints the sources of ineaciency it would also help banks with strategic planning 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

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

welfare costs of inflation and interest bearing money this work extends the lucas analysis of the welfare cost of inflation to an economy with interest bearing deposits lower and upper bounds to lucas measure of the welfare cost of inflation are also provided the upper bound is shown to lie between lucas measure of the welfare cost of inflation and the area under the money demand curve starting with martin bailey in 1956 the literature on welfare costs of inflation has recently been enriched by contributions among others by lucas 1993 2000 dotsey and ireland 1996 and gillman 1993 1995 it remains yet to adequately integrate the banking sector in this process this work extends lucas analysis of the welfare cost of inflation developed in the mccallumgoodfriend 1987 framework to an economy with interest bearing deposits lower and upper bounds to lucas measure of the welfare cost of inflation are also provided the upper bound is shown to lie between lucas measure and the area under the money demand curve which characterizes bailey s method 1956 for calculating the welfare cost of inflation

banking costs generalized functional forms and estimation of economies of scale and scope recently researchers have claimed that the primitive cobb douglas production technology captures banking cost functions adequately these findings rule out scope economies and u shaped cost curves the rejection of the generalized flexible form postulated by the above authors is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to justify a cobb douglas specification using restricted generalized functional forms the authors find that the composite output cobb douglas specification is an inadequate description of banking cost technology translog specifications with multiple products capture the data best suggesting the presence of both scope and scale economies copyright 1989 by ohio state university press

a note on interest on required reserves as an instrument of monetary control abstract the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the potential role of interest on required reserves as a monetary control instrument it is found that an increase in the interest rate paid on reserves held at the federal reserve has counteracting effects on the variability of the money stock hence there is an optimal setting for the interest rate on required reserves that theoretically may include or lie anywhere between the extreme cases of no interest payment and the payment of interest at the maximum feasible level

seigniorage banking and the optimal quantity of money abstract this paper discusses seigniorage in an economy with imperfect competition in the banking sector the amount of total seigniorage and its division between the central bank and the banking sector are derived by using the opportunity cost concept of seigniorage the paper analyzes the impact of changes in inflation reserve requirements competition and technology on the division of seigniorage and on the welfare loss and relates the analysis to the concept of the optimal quantity of money

competition and interest rate ceilings in commercial banking regulations prohibiting the payment of explicit interest on demand deposits are gradually being eased as banks switch from payment in the form of free services to explicit interest both the level of money demand and the response of money demand to market interest rates will change banks are modeled here as being chamberlinian monopolistic competitors equilibrium deposit interest rate relationships are found for markets both with and without an effective interest rate ceiling and the behavior of the two markets is compared the elimination of deposit interest rate ceilings leads to increased money demand and an increased responsiveness of deposit rates to market interest rates

technological expectations and adoption of improved technology abstract attention is focused upon the adoption demand rather than the creation supply of new technology which improves from time to time based on the expected flow of technological progress over which the firm demander has no control it must decide either to adopt the current best available technology or to postpone adoption the distinguishing features of the model are that more than one technological innovation is anticipated and expectations about the likelihood of such innovations are revised as time passes since the last innovation our analysis shows that the firm will adopt the current best practice if its technological lag exceeds a certain threshold moreover as time passes without new technological advances it may become profitable to purchase a technology that has been available even though it was not profitable to do so in the past

how do banks respond to shocks a dynamic model of deposit taking institutions abstract this paper proposes a dynamic model of the optimal choices of a bank that benefits from market power and takes into account the impact of the deposit generation process interbank lending borrowing emerges as a buffer that assists the bank in smoothing intertemporal adjustments in interdependent loan and deposit choices the bank smooths the impact of interest rates shocks on its customers to minimize the adjustments over time of the stocks of deposits and loans it does not however provide insurance against negative shocks of real origin that increase its expected default costs the predictions of the model help to shed light on the available empirical evidence and to analyze some recent developments of the banking industry

contribution of demand shifts to industrial so 2 emissions in a transition economy evidence from china abstract for the past 20 years sulfur dioxide so2 emissions control has been a goal in china whose economy has been characterized as fast growing and in enormous transition as a prerequisite for effective future so2 emissions control a detailed investigation is needed to uncover and assess the contributions to changes in so2 emissions of key underlying drivers associated with china s evolving demand structure using structural decomposition analysis sda considering industrial characteristics and sector interactions this study identifies the underlying drivers behind china s demand structure shifts as well as their contributions to changes in industrial so2 emissions the results show that the change in total final demand was the largest driver of the increase in so2 emissions resulting in an increase of 36 64 million tons mt so2 emissions during the time period 1997 to 2012 from the final demand perspective the change in capital formation was the largest contributor resulting in an increase of 16 78 mt so2 emissions and accounting for 45 of the increase due to final demand shifts the construction industry was the primary trigger of industrial so2 emissions growth caused by shifts in final demand with an induced amount impact on other industries of so2 emissions of 10 14 mt the key drivers capturing shifts in final demand were mainly capital formation in the construction industry capital formation and exports in technology intensive industries and consumption in the services industries the recommendation is that to control industrial so2 emissions china should depend first on its economic transition that includes technology improvements and industry structure optimization for both final demand and production

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

an empirical analysis of scale and scope economies and technical change in an irish multiproduct banking firm abstract in contrast to most empirical investigations of the efficiency of multiproduct financial institutions which either estimate scale and scope economies with a given state of technology or only analyse technical change in the presence of overall scale economies this study estimates overall scale economies product specific scale economies and scope economies in the presence of both neutral and non neutral technical change also in contrast to most other empirical studies in this area standard errors are computed for all relevant statistics the findings indicate diseconomies of scope overall diseconomies of scale product specific economies are decreasing for investments and increasing for loans in addition to substantial neutral technical change biased technical change is labour and capital saving and deposits using in character

entry and managerial incentives abstract this paper presents a two period full information model of entry where owners of incumbent and entrant firms endogenously select the incentive schemes for their managers it is shown that when output decisions are delegated to managers the incumbent s owner chooses to base incentive schemes only partly on profit but if output decisions are reached via nash bargaining between managers the incumbent s owner will base the reward on profit alone the entrant never bases the incentive scheme solely on profit if there is a sufficiently high fixed cost of entry then the incumbent can deter entry by providing management with appropriate incentive schemes

scale and scope economies in the multi product banking firm abstract the multi product nature of the banking firm is examined utilizing the translog cost function this analysis indicates that contrary to conventional wisdom natural monopoly scale economies and product specific decreasing costs are not robust characterizations of the banking industry there is however evidence that the cost function is characterized by economies of scope the implications of these results are discussed and extensions of this approach suggested

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

the role of fixed costs and cost complementarities in determining scope economies and the cost of narrow banking proposals narrow banking proposals would separate insured deposits from most types of bank lending using data from large u s banks the authors examine the extent to which narrow banking proposals are likely to result in increased production costs production costs will rise for nonjoint provision of deposit and loan services if there are cost complementarities in producing the two outputs jointly or if joint production enables banks to spread their fixed costs more effectively unlike standard cost function approaches the authors methods allow them to estimate the fixed cost and cost complementarity effects separately they find the net production cost consequences of narrow banking to be negligible copyright 1993 by university of chicago press

a general equilibrium money and banking paradigm in this paper we propose and analyze a new paradigm for monetary analysis that is considerably richer than the standard money multiplier models found in the literature a general equilibrium approach to financial assets is developed that leads directly to a multiplier system that transcends the traditional dependence on demand deposits and is easily amenable to exposition and manipulation the model incorporates financial innovation and regulatory changes easily and allows for the general equilibrium effects of the variation in financial ratios that result from induced movements in income interest rates or prices the current analysis differs from traditional multiplier presentations in two distinct ways first the traditional approach to monetary expansion and multiplier analysis relies upon the ratios of various financial assets to demand deposits over the last decade decreased financial regulation and subsequent innovation have substantially changed the nature of depository institution liabilities and their substitutability with demand deposits this has led to the reduction in emphasis on demand deposits per se and an increasing dependence upon transaction accounts other than demand deposits thrift institutions now accounts automatic transfer accounts and overdrafts money market mutual funds and overnight repurchase agreements have made the dependence on demand deposits as a basis for multiplier analysis somewhat obsolete and artificial the model developed here can accommodate any number of transaction assets by specifying general asset demand ratios relative to total household wealth the second and more fundamental way in which our model differs from existing ones is the way in which it weds general equilibrium considerations with simple multiplier analysis the traditional approach to multipliers is to assume that any ratio between two financial assets vying for a role in the aggregate wealth portfolio is exogenous and invariant to other variables in today s economy this seems rather inappropriate any regulatory or asset preference change will result in changes in the endogenous variables in the economy which will further impact financial demands the exogeneity of asset preferences and reserve ratios is no

comparing structural decomposition analysis and index to analyze and understand historical changes in economic environmental employment or other socio economic indicators it is useful to assess the driving forces or determinants that underlie these changes two techniques for decomposing indicator changes at the sector level are structural decomposition analysis sda and index decomposition analysis ida for example sda and ida have been used to analyze changes in indicators such as energy use co2 emissions labor demand and value added the changes in these variables are decomposed into determinants such as technological demand and structural effects sda uses information from input output tables while ida uses aggregate data at the sector level the two methods have developed quite independently which has resulted in each method being characterized by specific unique techniques and approaches this paper has three aims first the similarities and differences between the two approaches are summarized second the possibility of transferring specific techniques and indices is explored finally a numerical example is used to illustrate differences between the two approaches

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

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

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

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

identifying critical supply chain paths that drive changes in co2 emissions abstract to address the problem of global warming it is important to identify the supply chain paths that drive changes in life cycle co2 emissions and provide both policy makers and decision makers with the information on the critical paths in order to efficiently reduce the co2 emissions in this article i extract and analyze the factors and key supply chains involved in changes in co2 emissions associated with japan s overall demand from 1990 to 2000 using the structural path decomposition spd method applied to the 1990 1995 2000 linked japanese environmental input output tables at the four digit commodity classification level the results reveal that the volume of co2 emissions increased as a result of changes in the input structure of the electricity of the services sector such as electricity amusement and recreation facilities household demand electricity retail trade household demand and electricity public administration local local government demand indicating increasing dependence of services on energy input i also find that the final demand shift changed co2 emissions for example the rise in demand for integrated circuits in exports has contributed to increasing co2 emissions generated from electricity the fall in demand for frozen fish and shellfish in household demand has contributed to decreasing co2 emissions from marine fisheries

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

what is the role of openness for china s aggregate industrial so2 emission a structural analysis based on the divisia decomposition method abstract having observed the weaknesses in previous structural analyses on the role of environmental kuznets curve ekc the author proposes a detailed analysis using a rich data set of provincial level production and so2 emission intensity of 13 industrial sectors the latter represent more than 98 of the total industrial production in each chinese province for the period 1991 2001 through the use of the log mean divisia index decomposition method the variations in province level industrial so2 emissions with regard to the 1990 baseline level are decomposed into the contribution from three components scale composition and technical effects the following analysis seeks to explain how trade openness affects aggregate industrial so2 emission through its impact on the structural determinants for these three components of region specific environmental variations

economic gains and environmental losses from international trade a decomposition of pollution intensity in china s value added trade abstract based on a multi regional input output model this study explores the temporal changes and driving forces of china s environmental losses relative to its economic gains from international trade with each of its 45 trading partners from 1995 to 2015 we find that china suffered larger environment losses per us value added through exports than almost all of its trading partners over time the environmental losses paid by china declined quicker than that of its bilateral trading partners the decomposition results of our research further show that the technology effect played a dominant role in this decline moreover the phenomenon that developed economies have outsourced dirty intermediate production stages to emerging economies via trade in intermediate goods has led to the emerging economies suffering greater environmental losses over time for certain economic gains from international trade

the evolution of market structure when there is a sequence of innovations the paper explores the question of how market structure evolves when there is a sequence of opportunities to innovate does one firm extend its technological superiority to become increasingly dominant or does technological leadership constantly change hands in a process of actionreaction a simple duopoly model is proposed in which the answer to this question depends upon the nature of product market behaviour in that model highly competitive product market behaviour leads to increasing dominance whereas cournot behaviour may lead to action reaction

imperfect competition in bank retail markets deposit and loan rate dynamics and incomplete pass through this paper examines determinants of pass through from the market interest rate to bank retail deposit and loan rates a dynamic adjustment cost model with imperfect competition implies that these rates depend on own lagged values and on lagged current and expected future values of the security rate greater competition in retail markets reduces the impact of lagged and expected rates on current retail rates while raising the effect of the current security rate yielding greater pass through these results have important implications for both the specifications used in empirical work and biases introduced into estimates of pass through effects

invention and innovation under alternative market structures the case of natural resources this paper examines the interactions between market structure and resource allocation over time when there is endogenous technical progress the structures considered are a planned economy pure monopoly and competition with patent rights in an efficient allocation the date of invention coincides with the date of innovation the date at which technology is used this is also true with a pure monopoly but monopoly retards technical progress relative to the efficient level competition for patents rights to a new technology results in excessively rapid technical progress if the resource endowment of the economy is sufficiently large also competition may lead to sleeping patents where invention strictly precedes the date of innovation

an empirical study of joint production and scale economies in commercial banking this paper utilizes the translog cost function to test the proposition that the bank productionfunction is characterized by jointness the cross section analysis for the years 1973 through 1978 indicates that bank production is in fact characterized by jointness this result calls into question the findings and implications of studies that utilize the assumption of non jointness in production since virtually all of the major bank cost studies employ the assumption of nonjointness the second part of our analysis examines scale economies for the banking firm while allowing for jointness in production our estimates indicate that scale economies characterize bank production at only small bank sizes and that the cost structure of large banks is characterized by diseconomies of scale

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

the strategic choice of managerial incentives do firms with separate owners and managers maximize profits we address this question for an oligopoly where managers compete in quantities or prices as in the cournot or bertrand models and owners choose their managers incentives we find that there is a strategic aspect in the problem of selecting incentives and that profit maximizing behavior does not result in particular in the oligopoly we study the behavior of firms competing in quantity price more closely resembles perfectly competitive collusive behavior than cournot bertrand behavior

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

controlling monetary aggregates the discount window this paper argues that current discount window policy coupled with non borrowed reserve targeting of the federal reserve makes the quantity of high powered money endogenous examination of the advisability of this procedure in a stochastic environment is conducted using a general equilibrium financial model it is concluded that the current policy reduces the destabilizing effects of shifts between various depository financial assets but increases the effect of other asset portfolio shifts and aggregate supply disturbances these results are consistent with the work of poole inasmuch as the current debate over discount policy is a repackaging of the debate over interest rate or aggregates control for monetary policy

capacity output and sequential entry two crucial assumptions frequently made in industrial organization are that an established firm deters entry either by a constant high output the sylos postulate or by high excess capacity the excess capacity hypothesis these assumptions may be an accurate description of the observed conduct of firms in some industries however when the rules of the post entry game are clearly specified the optimal output and investment strategies of an established firm may depart considerably from these behavioral assumptions because of this possible inconsistency with rational behavior any conclusions about the formation of industry based upon either assumption are highly suspect what is more these assumptions avoid the main issue of whether entry deterrence is worthwhile at all this paper presents a dynamic model of entry in which established firms pursue a cournot nash alternatively stackelberg strategy toward a potential entrant the entrant behaves in cournot nash fashion and chooses output on the basis of expected postentry profits at the equilibrium of the post entry game within this framework a constant output entry deterring strategy would involve maintenance of an entry deterring output level before and after entry is threatened an excess capacity entry deterring strategy would involve holding excess capacity at an entry deterring level and increasing output to that level after entry is threatened special conditions are presented under which the sylos postulate or the excess capacity hypothesis will accurately describe optimal entry deterring strategies in addition special conditions are examined under which the established firm maintains a constant output or holds pre entry excess capacity when large scale entry does in fact take place the analysis shows that in general established firm reactions to entry are quite different from these special cases the sylos postulate see joseph bain paolo sylos labini franco modigliani 1958 asserts not only that potential entrants expect established firms to maintain their output constant as entry occurs but that established firms keep output constant at a level that deters entry whether or not it is profitable to do so hailed as a welcome major breakthrough on the oligopoly front modigliani 1958 the sylos postulate underlies many papers in the large theoretical and empirical literature on limit pricing yet the sylos postulate ignores both the strategic interaction between firms and the dynamic aspects of entry 2 unless the established firm s monopoly output exceeds the entrydeterring level the established firm with a general cost function able to choose an entry deterring output level will instead always desire a lower output level before entry for the special case where capacity is an upper bound on output and the established firm is a stackelberg leader in the post entry game

the evolution of new industries and the determinants of market structure several empirical regularities concerning firm growth rates and industry firm size distributions have been developed by studying primarily mature industries the primary purpose of this article is to bring together and extend empirical regularities on the evolution of new industries and to use these regularities to gain further insight into the forces governing industry evolution to explain these regularities a model is constructed which emphasizes how factors governing the early evolution of industries may shape their market structure at maturity it stresses how chance events and exogenous factors that influence the number of potential entrants to the industry the growth rate of incumbents and the ease of imitation of industry leaders will influence the ultimate number and size distribution of firms in the industry

branching restrictions and banking costs abstract previous research of banking costs has been limited by the choice of the functional form irregularities in the estimated cost functions and a failure to rigorously examine the difference between banks in branching states and banks in unit banking states this paper addresses these shortcomings banks are modelled as three input three output cost minimizing firms a three equation system is estimated using 1985 functional cost analysis data the findings indicate that banks in unit banking states experience diseconomies of scale banks in branching states experience diseconomies of scale at the bank level but economies of scale at the branch level we also find evidence of economies of scope for branch state banks but not for unit state banks

reserve requirements and economic stability reserve requirements have become a common institutional feature of our monetary systems they are widely held to be indispensable for zfficient control of the financial sector of the economy yet relatively little analysis has been directed at the question of what constitutes an optimal level and structure of reserve requirements in the traditional literature the major exceptions concetn some discussions of the extreme values of 100 percent or zero requirements especially the former see e g 1 5 6 7 10 for a zero required reserve proposal see 3 in recent years some newer studies dealing with these issues have appeared see e g 8 9 11 12 15 in all of these studies the focus is almost exclusively on money stock control generally speaking their results support the 100 percent reserves idea though such a scheme is usually seen as infeasible for political or institutional reasons leading to recommendations to set requirements as high as possible against deposits included in the money stock subject to whatever constraints of this nature are perceived the underlying idea of course is that this minimizes the influence of private sector disturbances on the money stock by lowering the money multiplier and making it equal to one in the extreme case of a 100 percent requirement reserve requirements are comparable to a tax on a particular economic activity namely the production of deposit accounts as such they have efficiency effects similar to those of a tax on other types of activities although this has always been

entry spending and firm size in a stochastic r d race a model is developed to explain participation and spending on rd a flow cost of expenditure for the duration of the race which affects both the profitability of winning and the speed of development the poisson parameter both with diminishing returns allowance for an effect of firm size on the effectiveness profit cost of development the operational decision concerning the level and intensity of commitment in case of participation is modelled in a traditional fashion as the maximization of expected returns the strategic decision whether or not to participate at an optimal level and intensity is modelled as a stochastic process of deliberation between different makers and influencers of decisions in the firm the latter is to be seen as an introduction of the political and resource dependence views of organisations the resulting model of r d participation as a function of firm size is tested empirically on data from an r d survey in the netherlands

competitive interest payments on bank deposits and the long run demand for money reply this paper tests two assumptions made in previous demand for money studies the first assumption concerns the role assigned to the interest rate in the demand for money function common practice identifies the rate of interest with the opportunity cost of holding money in section i this formulation is shown to blur an important distinction between the price of money and the price of money substitutes and to implicitly assume that the relevant price variable is the difference between these two distinct prices a second assumption is that the current ban on interest payments on demand deposits is fully effective in section ii i operationally define these price variables and estimate perfectly competitive interest payments on commercial bank deposits this is done by crudely measuring commercial bank marginal costs and assuming that all excess profit is passed on to depositors in indirect ways section iii presents estimates of a more complete longrun demand for money relationship which explicitly includes an own price and a cross price as separate influences and assumes that the prohibition of the payment of interest on deposits is totally ineffective although no firm conclusion is reached concerning the proper functional specification of the demand function the results significantly improve upon previous demand for money estimates which assumed that the interest payment prohibition is totally effective in section iv the results are summarized and implications of the analysis for monetary theory are presented my competitive demand for money formulation leads to a reinterpretation of the existing evidence on what is generally referred to as the interest elasticity of demand for money this estimate is shown to be significantly biased downward it also implies that the demand for and supply of money are more interdependent than is usually assumed

bank market structure and monetary control financial innovations and regulatory actions together have acted to produce sweeping changes in the u s financial environment much of the recent literature in the area of money and banking has been concerned with the implications of these developments for monetary policy however one major aspect of this issue which has been relatively ignored is the relationship between the competitive structure of banking markets and the capability of the federal reserve to exercise control over its intermediate or ultimate policy goals given that deregulation of banking and various forms of financial innovations e g technological innovations in the provision of financial services the proliferation of various near money financial assets and the growth of nonbank financial intermediaries have altered the competitive environment in banking it seems clear that this relationship should be investigated two previous efforts to examine the monetary policy implications of different bank market structures are aftalion and white 1977 and vanhoose 1983 in each of those papers the short run real sector effects of potential policy instruments under the structural extremes of perfect competition and monopoly are derived and contrasted however the analysis in each case is based upon models in which perfect certainty is assumed and no interactions are allowed between the real and

monetary policy in a model with a federal funds market fixed versus flexible deposit rates this paper examines the comparative static effects of various monetary policy instruments under the assumption of a market determined interest rate on demand deposits and alternatively for the case of an exogenously fixed demand deposit rate in both cases monetary policy effects are analyzed where the monetary policy operating target is either the federal funds rate or a reserve aggregate the aim of the paper is to assess the differences in monetary policy effects for each operating procedure between the flexible and fixed deposit rate cases we extend previous analyses of this subject by incorporating an explicit federal funds market in our model and providing a detailed analysis of monetary policy with a federal funds rate operating target with both a flexible and a fixed deposit rate additionally we consider the differences in the role of secondary monetary policy instruments such as the discount rate and the required reserve ratio in the different regimes finally the paper considers the implications of flexibility of the deposit rate for the feasibility of the current monetary policy strategy of using a short run operating target either the federal funds rate or a reserve aggregate to attain target

incentive schemes as strategic variables an application to a mixed duopoly abstract in the context of asymmetry of information between firms owners and their managers we investigate the use of incentive contracts as strategic variables in a duopoly with a public and a private firm by giving the public manager an incentive scheme based on a linear combination of profit and sales revenue we show that welfare can be improved furthermore we show that the government should not privatize the public company

should multiproduct firms provide divisional or corporate incentives abstract this paper points out some of the implications of the internal organization of a multiproduct firm for its market conduct in particular we study the strategic use of organizational forms based on corporate incentives versus forms based on divisional incentives the equilibrium internal organization is determined in a model with full information it is shown that firms provide corporate incentives when goods are substitutes and divisional incentives when goods are complements and the result holds both in the case of quantity setting and price setting

sulfur dioxide control in china policy evolution during the 10th and 11th five year plans and lessons for the future china s central government established national goals to reduce sulfur dioxide so2 emissions by 10 in both the 10th and 11th five year plan periods 2001 2005 and 2006 2010 respectively but the early policies were unsuccessful at reducing emissions emissions increased 28 during the 10th five year plan after adapting a number of policies and introducing new instruments during the 11th five year plan so2 emissions declined by 14 we examine the evolution of these policies their interplay with technical and institutional factors and capture lessons from the 11th five year plan to guide future pollution control programs we find that several factors contributed to achievement of the 11th five year plan so2 reduction goal 1 instrument choice 2 political accountability 3 emission verification 4 political support 5 streamlined targets and 6 political and financial incentives the approach integrated multiple policy instruments market based command and control and administrative instruments specific to the chinese context the evolution of so2 reduction policies and programs has implications for further so2 reductions from power plants and other sources as well as control of other atmospheric pollutants such as nitrogen oxides nox and carbon dioxide co2 in china

monetary instruments and policy rules in a rational expectations environment abstract this paper explores the implications of rational expectations and the aggregate supply theory advanced by lucas 1973 and barro 1976 for analysis of optimal monetary policy under uncertainty along the lines of poole 1970 returning to a topic initially treated by sargent and wallace 1975 not surprisingly these two classical concepts alter both the menu of feasible policy choice and the desirability of certain policy actions in our setup unlike that of sargent and wallace 1975 the systematic component of monetary policy is a relevant determinant of the magnitude of business fluctuations that arise from shocks to the system central bank behavior both the selection of monetary instruments and the framing of overall policy response to economic conditions can work to diminish or increase the magnitude of business fluctuations however the activist policies stressed by the present discussion bear little if any relationship to the policy options rationalized by the conventional analysis of monetary policy under uncertainty in particular in contrast to poole s analysis money supply responses to the nominal interest rate are not important determinants of real economic activity rather the central bank should focus on policies that make movements in the general price level readily identifiable by economic agents

lumpy investment in a growing differentiated market optimum consider now a growing differentiated market that is a market for a chamberlinian group of differentiated commodities which is expanding over time as the size of the market increases it will be profitable for new firms to enter with new varieties of the industry product the same strategic considerations apply as with a homogeneous industry investment in new products involves irreversible and indivisible costs thus decisions of a potential entrant depend on the past decisions of earlier entrants and on the decisions of future entrants as to entry date price and type of product produced in this way the equilibria that we consider here differ from nash equilibria in static models in that the profit flows accruing to incumbent firms depend on the behaviour of future entrants one consequence of this for example is that the nash equilibrium we consider here involves pure profit for all producing firms when a reasonably large number of products is established in the market the industry can be regarded as monopolistically competitive it is appropriate then to pose in this context traditional questions concerning the welfare optimality of monopolistic competition will there be too much variety with each product produced inefficiently the dynamic aspect of the problem means that it is perfectly possible in principle to have excessive variety at one stage in the growth of a market and insufficient variety at some different stage note that one relevant decision variable is the introduction date of a new product or of a whole sequence of products provided that variable costs can be covered a particular product once introduced will not leave the set at a later date thus if we take any given chronological sequence of product types and

carbon dioxide emission drivers for a typical metropolis using input output structural decomposition analysis as the capital of china beijing is regarded as a major metropolis in the world study of the variation in temporal co2 emissions generated by the driving forces in beijing can provide guidance for policy decisions on co2 emissions mitigation in global metropolises based on input output structural decomposition analysis io sda we analysed the driving forces for the increment in co2 emissions in beijing from both production and final demand perspectives during 1997 2010 according to our results the co2 emission growth in beijing is driven mainly by production structure change and population growth partly offset by co2 emission intensity reduction as well as the decline in per capita final demand volume during the study period final demand structure change has a limited effect on the change in the co2 emissions in beijing from the final demand perspective urban trades urban residential consumption government consumption and fixed capital formation are mainly responsible for the booming emissions this study showed how the top down io sda methodology was implemented on a city scale policy implications from this study would be helpful for addressing co2 emissions mitigation in global capital cities and metropolises

bank reserves and financial stability a stochastic financial model is developed which derives the reserve levels on financial assets which minimize price level fluctuations it is shown that these levels of reserves are a function of the structure of unanticipated shocks to asset demands and are in general quite different from the levels which minimize the fluctuations of either the nominal or real value of these assets application of the model to currency and demand deposits in the u s a suggest that the price stabilizing reserve ratio on demand deposits is approximately one half of the 12 currently mandated by the monetary control act of 1980 required reserves on deposits at financial institutions have two major economic aspects first reserves may be regarded as a tax on bank liabilities if the rate of return on reserves measured either explicitly or implicitly is less than the market rate of interest secondly reserves may be considered an important monetary instrument for controlling the value of monetary aggregates and ultimately such variables as prices interest rates and income 1 unfortunately there appears to be little agreement among economists either as to the optimal level of reserves or to the criteria for setting such reserves in order to achieve macroeconomic stability friedman 3 had formerly advocated 100 percent reserves on both time and demand deposits but recently 4 has claimed that uniformity of reserves on transactions balances is far more important than the level at which they are imposed 2 at the other end of the spectrum carson 1 has advocated abolishing required reserves on all deposits while poole and lieberman 11 have urged elimination of reserves on time deposits only if m1 is accepted as the money stock definition this paper develops a macroeconomic model where it is demonstrated that the levels of reserves which minimize the fluctuations of such ultimate economic variables as prices are in general quite different from those which stabilize various monetary aggregates these reserve levels which minimize price level fluctuations are determined primarily from the covariance structure of unanticipated disturbances influencing financial assets empirical estimation of asset disturbances for the united states suggests that these stabilizing levels of reserves on demand deposit are lower than those scheduled to prevail under the monetary control act of 1980

deregulation and oligopolistic rivalry in bank deposit markets abstract this paper provides a partial equilibrium analysis of a deregulated market for bank deposits in which banks behave oligopolistically but entry and exit are freely permitted it is demonstrated that the effects of variations in market interest rates reserve requirements and bank cost and demand conditions upon the market quantity of bank deposit money are fundamentally altered if the degree of bank rivalry adjusts endogenously hence banking deregulation may produce significant changes in the relationships between these variables and the stock of deposit money

money and banking in a cash in advance economy this paper studies banking and financial innovations in a stochasti c general equilibrium model assuming the existence of two distinct types of goods cash goods which can only be purchased by cash and check goods which can also be purchased by checks drawn against interest bearing bank accounts the authors analyze the effects of changes in the payment s structure i e the share of check goods reserve requirements on banks and changes in the supply of reserves the authors find e g that an increased share of check goods and a decrease of the bank reserve ratio in general both lead to a decrease in the variance of the price level copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association