banking sector performance profitability and efficiency a citation based systematic literature review this study presents a citation based systematic literature review on banking sector performance particularly in terms of profitability productivity and efficiency specifically the study aims to identify the leading sources of knowledge in terms of the most influential journals authors and papers the paper presents a content analysis of the 100 most cited papers in total 1996 peer review papers were found relevant in the scopus database by using a comprehensive list of keywords the results show that the journal of banking finance appears to be the leading journal in terms of publication count and citations based on total citations allen berger is the most prolific author the most cited paper is problem loans and cost efficiency in commercial banks by allan berger and robert deyoung the content analysis of the top 100 papers identifies five essential themes determinants of efficiency methodology ownership financial crises and scale economies in terms of estimation approaches 74 of papers employed frontier analysis which includes 34 parametric and 40 nonparametric methods and remaining 26 have used financial ratio analysis additionally stochastic frontier and data envelopment analysis are widely used in parametric and nonparametric methods respectively an intermediate approach is extensively adopted for the specification of inputs and outputs

a cost function of greek non ferrous metal industry abstract a translog cost function in the form of a third order series taylor expansion was used for the estimation of cost in the greek non ferrous metal industry which is based on an annual time series for the period 1969 1990 concerning the price of production factors the production volume and the total cost of production the estimated cost function permit us to have average and marginal cost curves of typical form for each time point also it is useful for projecting costs and the optimum scale of production under conditions which concern 1 i the development of prices production and product factors and 2 ii demand

national price levels purchasing power parity and cointegration a test of four high inflation economies abstract the time series properties of exchange rates and wholesale prices from four high inflation countries show some evidence in support of purchasing power parity tests for stationarity of real exchange rates and cointegration among price and exchange rate variables are presented for argentina brazil chile and israel during the 1970s and 1980s error correction models describe the mechanism of adjustment to long run equilibrium

financial deregulation and productivity growth in banking sector empirical evidence from bangladesh this article examines the effects of regulatory reform on productivity growth in the bangladesh banking industry we use a unique balanced panel dataset comprising bank level annual data from the e

do real exchange rates contain a unit root evidence from turkish data this study explores whether the long run purchasing power parity ppp hypothesis holds for selected real exchange rates from turkish economy during the period 1982m1 2003m12 in addition to conventional unit root tests five different unit root test procedures have been applied including efficient point optimal tests extended m tests and gls detrended variants of df tests to four monthly real exchange rate series defined in terms of both producer and consumer price indices the countries analysed are the usa the uk germany and italy which are major trade partners of turkey mixed evidence is found for the long run ppp hypothesis when real exchange rate is defined in terms of german dm and italian lira however the empirical analysis reveals that the ppp hypothesis holds strongly in the long run for the uk and us based real exchange rates series using either ppi or cpi in corroboration with other studies in the literature the bias correlated half life estimates suggest relatively faster speeds of

unit roots and the real exchange rate before world war i the case of britain and the usa abstract unit root and cointegration tests indicate that the dollar pound real exchange rate was stationary during the us greenback and gold standard periods purchasing powwer parity ppp performed about equally well in the two periods and better than in recent years deviations from ppp were corrected by changes in british prices and us gold dollar prices greenback prices did not adjust the similarity of the adjustment parameters in the two periods suggests that expectations of a return to gold were embedded in the greenback price of gold

parametric efficiency tests economies of scale and input demand in u s electric power generation duality theory has been applied increasingly in recent years to study the structure of production a major advantage of using duality theory is that systems of input demand equations can be derived by simple differentiation facilitating the use of flexible functional forms also use of duality theory makes it possible to choose a representation of the technology which has desirable properties for estimation such as exogeneity of the regressors however the use of a dual representation of production structure is appropriate only if the corresponding maintained hypothesis concerning economic behavior e g cost minimization or profit maximization is valid the perceived advantages of the dual approach to studying production structure have led to some applications in which the maintained hypothesis concerning economic behavior is unlikely to be appropriate for example neoclassical cost functions have been used to study the characteristics of production in regulated industries despite an extensive theoretical literature indicating that a profit maximizing regulated firm would not minimize costs subject to market prices 2 in this paper we propose a generalized cost function that retains the principal advantages of the neoclassical cost function but does not require that cost minimization subject to market prices be imposed as a maintained hypothesis in our model firms are assumed to base their production decisions on unobservable shadow prices which reflect the effects of regulation on the effective prices of inputs parametric tests for cost minimization are obtained by expressing shadow prices as functions of market prices the generalized cost function is estimated with data for regulated electric utilities the parametric restrictions corresponding to cost minimizing behavior subject to market prices are rejected implying that the use of a neoclassical cost function is not appropriate in this application 3

purchasing power parity and unit root tests using panel data abstract this paper reports the results of unit root tests for real exchange rates using a panel framework this panel approach provides greatly improved power compared to conventional univariate time series unit root tests we obtain evidence supporting ppp over the recent flexible exchange rate period for g 6 and oecd countries we show explicitly that failure to find such evidence in previous research was due to the low power of the tests

estimation of profit functions when profit is not maximum this paper deals with derivation and implications of profit functions when profit is not maximum due to the presence of either technical inefficiency or allocative inefficiency or both we show that input demand and output supply elasticities and returns to scale are in general affected by these inefficiencies we also show that the overall profit efficiency is not necessarily the product of technical and allocative efficiencies meaning that technical and allocative inefficiencies are not necessarily independent estimation techniques are developed for both cross sectional and panel data models working of the model is illustrated using a panel of 60 salmon farms copyright 2001 oxford university press

are real exchange rates nonstationary evidence from a panel data test it is well documented that real exchange rates between the united states and many industrialized countries in the post bretton woods period are integrated this result implies that purchasing power parity ppp does not hold even as a long run relationship this paper demonstrates that the failure to reject the unit root hypothesis may result from the low power of existing univariate test procedures i test for unit roots in real exchange rates by employing a more powerful panel based procedure using both cpi and wpi real dollar exchange rate data i strongly reject the null hypothesis of a unit root my results provide overwhelming support for the long run ppp under the current float copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

estimating a non minimum cost function for hospitals hospital costs have been rigorously scrutinized by economists and health policy experts for several decades despite the large volume of research two related problems persist first although theoretical models of hospital behavior such as 9 and 10 suggest systematic deviations from cost minimization there has been little attention given to modelling and measuring this inefficiency second because cost minimization is a questionable maintained hypothesis most hospital cost research has not used cost functions that are dual to production technology consequently the technological concepts of scale and factor substitution are obscured we address these twin problems by developing and estimating a long run cost function that allows for systematic allocative inefficiency the parameter estimates we present also provide information on the traditional production concepts of scale and factor substitution as well as information on the size and source of allocative inefficiency in u s hospitals hospital services clearly comprise a large industry short term hospital expenditures were 120 billion in 1984 for example the u s short term hospital sector has increased in relative size by a factor of 2 5 since 1960 so that short term hospital expenditures are now about 3 6 percent of the gnp in the united states while industry size alone probably justifies an empirical investigation into the production technology for hospital services we are also motivated by the relevance of our findings to several health policy issues measures of scale economies are crucial in forming public policies concerning entry exit and mergers in the hospital industry yet most studies have not actually estimated the technological concept of scale elasticities of factor substitution are also technological and economic concepts that should be of interest to health policy makers these measures indicate the extent to which cost increases can be avoided by substituting away from the factor whose price has increased hospital cost estimates that do not include factor

purchasing power parity in less developed and transition economies a review paper abstract the concept of purchasing power parity ppp has been the subject of numerous studies many of which have been unable to prove conclusively this core principle of international finance although industrialized countries have received most of the attention studies that focus on less developed and transition economies have also attained mixed results this study surveys trends in this branch of the literature highlighting the econometric advances that have sought to solve this puzzle while pointing out that more needs to be done to address the reasons that might cause ppp not to hold

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

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

output and productivity in banking concepts in banking output and the empirical literature on bank productivity which employs output concepts are critically surveyed for output the national accounts production and intermediation approaches are compared as regards productivity both partial and total factor productivity measures and the dea and parametric approaches to the latter are assessed among the most striking results is the prevalence of technical inefficiency in banking but it is also suggested that measurement techniques have often outpaced the theory of what is to be measured notably in fields such as joint production risk and competition alternative approaches to address these issues are suggested

are bureaucrats efficient an application to the provision of afdc the question on how bureaucrats behave in the provision of a public service has been the subject of a considerable amount of research most of which has been largely theoretical and inconclusive especially on the issue of efficiency this paper builds a bureaucratic theoretical model and provides empirical evidence by examining the workings of a government bureau supplying a public service namely aid to families with dependent children afdc at the state level it builds and estimates a generalized short run cost function that allows for systematic relative price inefficiency and does not require cost minimization subject to market prices as a maintained hypothesis the model tests cost minimization as a testable special case the estimating procedure allows us to test for a number of other features of the technology that are of interest such as productivity growth marginal costs returns to scale technical change and factor demands

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

competition leverage how the demand side affects optimal risk adjustment we study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low risk consumers insurers then have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly corrects for cost differences to achieve first best risk adjustment should overcompensate insurers for serving high risk agents second we identify a trade off between efficiency and consumer welfare reducing the difference in risk adjustment subsidies increases consumer welfare by leveraging competition from the elastic low risk market to the less elastic high risk market third mandatory pooling can increase consumer surplus further at the cost of efficiency

on cross country differences in the persistence of real exchange rates abstract previous findings of long run purchasing power parity come mainly from data for industrial countries raising the issue of whether the results suffer sample selection bias and exaggerate the general relevance of parity reversion this study uncovers substantial cross country heterogeneity in the persistence of deviations from parity the results show that it is more likely rather than less likely to find parity reversion for developing countries than industrial countries although some persistence variations may partly reflect country differences in structural characteristics such as inflation experience and government spending a considerable portion of those variations seems unaccounted for

the choice of numeraire currency in panel tests of purchasing power parity we investigate the implications of the choice of numeraire currency on panel tests of purchasing power parity under the current regime of flexible exchange rates by conducting panel unit root tests with twenty one different base currencies we show that the conditions necessary for numeraire irrelevancy are not supported empirically and that the choice of numeraire currency can and does matter for ppp the evidence of ppp is stronger for european than for non european base currencies distance between the countries and volatility of the exchange rates are the most important determinants of the results

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

testing efficiency hypotheses in joint production a parametric approach n recent years a great deal of research has been directed to the modelling and measurement of technical and allocative efficiency in production with few exceptions this research has been restricted to single product firms however recent developments in duality theory have facilitated the extension of this research to multi product firms the main purpose of this paper is to develop a model of the multiproduct firm in which the possibilities of both technical and allocative inefficiency are incorporated in an econometrically useful way the first model we develop includes a nonneutral2 type of technical inefficiency and three distinguishable types of allocative inefficiency output mix input mix and scale each type of inefficiency is costly to the firm in the sense that each causes a reduction in profit beneath the maximum value attainable under full efficiency the cost of each type of inefficiency depends on the magnitude of the inefficiency and the structure of the underlying production technology in the second model we develop technical inefficiency remains nonneutral but allocative inefficiency is not generally decomposable into output mix input mix and scale components however both technical and allocative inefficiency remain costly to the firm the cost of each type of inefficiency depending on its magnitude and the structure of the underlying production technology we model the technology of a competitive profit maximizing multi product firm with the dual profit function this enables us to use hotelling s lemma to generate a system of profit maximizing output supply and input demand equations these equations are then modified to allow for the possibility of technical and three types of allocative inefficiency a virtue of using the profit function to represent production technology is that it permits a straightforward comparison of maximum profit under full efficiency with actual profit and with the profit that would result from any combination of the four types of inefficiency this enables us to allocate the cost of inefficiency to each of four components our model of inefficiency is parametric and is embedded in a generalized leontief profit function although any flexible specification of the profit function can be used the model is developed in sections ii iv estimation of the model is considered in section v an empirical example designed to illustrate the workings of the model is discussed in section vi section vii concludes

purchasing power parity in developing countries multi period evidence under the current float abstract using panel unit root tests we examine purchasing power parity ppp for us dollar real exchange rates of developing countries during the current floating rate period since evidence of ppp may vary from period to period we examine the data for moving 10 year periods from 1976 85 up to 1990 99 we organize panels based on country characteristics influencing the validity of ppp those characteristics include openness inflation and the level and growth rate of per capita gdp although we find stronger evidence of ppp after 1980 our examination of panel data over 15 10 year periods yields only limited support for ppp

measuring the nominal value of financial services in the national income accounts measuring the nominal value of financial services in the national income accounts i introduction the treatment of financial services in national income accounting has been a sometimes controversial subject for over thirty years for economies which specializes in financial services such as switzerland and luxembourg the treatment of these services has always been critical to an accurate assessment of their domestic product and foreign trade status with the recent growth in the financial services sector in the united states this controversy and its resolution are again topical in the united states between 1977 and 1985 the commercial banking share of gnp increased by 34 7 percent while its share in national employment increased by 23 3 percent furthermore the internationalization of capital markets has significantly increased the importance of financial services in the u s trade accounts in this paper we examine both current and proposed treatments of financial services in the national income accounts specifically we briefly review the concepts and methods currently used by the united nations u n and the united states u s commerce department to determine the nominal value of financial services with particular emphasis on their treatment of uncharged for services many financial services are provided without an explicit charge these uncharged for financial services can be viewed as implicit payments to depositors for their funds or simply as payments in kind the issue in the national accounting literature is whether the net interest earned by financial firms should be treated as the value of these uncharged for services and whether it should be included in the nominal value of output in the national accounts 1 we then evaluate a variety of possible methods for inferring the nominal value of financial services from existing sources of information these methods are called imputation methods we base our evaluation of alternative imputation methods on their consistency with a microeconomic theory of financial firms grounded in a user cost of money concept developed by donovan 1978 and barnett 1980 and applied to financial firms by hancock 1985 we show that several of these imputation methods are inconsistent with or not closely related to this microeconomic foundation we then derive a general imputation formula within the financial firm framework and demonstrate how the two leading imputation methods those of the u s department of commerce and the u n statistical office are specializations of this formula our framework thus provides a heretofore absent economic rationalization for the imputation methods commonly used we then briefly introduce a conceptual framework for the construction of a financial firm output price index this index yields a measure of real output consistent with the accounting approaches we summarize our points in the concluding section ii current views of interest payments in national accounts the revenues of financial firms consist largely of net interest the difference between interest received primarily from loans and interest paid primarily on deposit accounts and explicit service charges service charges are typically only a minor part of the total revenue received by banks and fall short of covering the non interest cost of operations by implication financial firms provide services for which there is not an explicit charge and the cost of these services must be partly or wholly offset by net interest controversy however exists over how to value the implicit financial services provided because of long held differences about the way in which interest is viewed as a transfer payment between borrowers and lenders or as a payment for services rendered interest as a transfer payment in this view financial firms merely serve as conduits for the interest payment flows between borrowers and lenders depositors

behavior of the firm under regulatory constraint a recent article by akira takayama discusses an earlier paper by harvey averch and leland l johnson on fair rate of return regulation of public utilities although takayama p 255 agrees with averch and johnson s general conclusions that a firm will tend to increase its investment with the introduction of an active constraint on its rate of return he criticizes the a j argument as being confusing ambiguous and in error takayama then attempts a clarification and presents a new formulation which leads to the a j result quoted above this comment will discuss several of takayama s criticisms in addition to showing that the so called a j effect cannot be derived from the basic assumptions made by both averch and johnson and takayama 1 we will show that the very assumptions used to prove the a j effect by defining the region of x require an assumption that the a j effect exists in the first place

financial intermediation and delegated monitoring this paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders it presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs even in a risk neutral economy the paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems in the environment assumed in the model debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal the analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries

the complementarity between risk adjustment and community rating distorting market outcomes to facilitate redistribution abstract we analyze optimal risk adjustment in competitive health insurance markets when insurers have better information on their customers risk profiles than the sponsor of health insurance in the optimal scheme the sponsor uses reinsurance to screen insurers with bad and good risks in order to lower premiums for enrollees with high expected healthcare costs we then explore the effects of adding a community rating requirement to complement this risk adjustment scheme with community rating insurers have incentives to distort contract generosities to cherry pick low cost consumers however the reduced generosity for low cost types makes screening through reinsurance easier allowing the sponsor to redistribute more when costs for reinsurance are low or the sponsor s bias towards high cost consumers is high community rating dominates risk rating

the effects of shared atm networks on the efficiency of turkish banks this study investigates whether forming shared atm networks has yielded positive benefits for banks in turkey by increasing their productive efficiency using a data envelopment analysis dea approach pure technical and scale efficiency scores of turkish banks are estimated and analysed for the period 2000 2003 the results suggest that although it is possible to realize positive effects through atm sharing arrangements there are multiple factors that determine which banks realize such benefits the geographical distribution of shared atms between urban and rural markets and the level of competition between banks within urban areas are shown to be important determinants of differences in bank efficiency this discrepancy between the gains associated with atm sharing may have important implications concerning the adoption and sharing of new technology by banks in developing countries

data transformations in dea cone ratio envelopment approaches for monitoring bank performances abstract cone ratio dea data envelopment analysis models are suggested for monitoring and or early warning systems to be used by bank regulatory agencies illustrative examples are developed from data on 1984 and 1985 performances of the 16 largest banks in texas five large non texas banks are introduced as excellent performers to help evaluate these texas banks in terms of their risk coverage as well as efficiency cone ratio envelopment areused to tarnsform original data in order to reflect performances by the non texas banks with respect to risk coverage as well as efficiency formulas for transforming to and from the original data are supplied with accompanying explanations and interpretations which include comparisons with the risk adjusted capital and risk coverage allowances formulas that have been adopted recently by u s government and other regulators in banking and insurance in conformance with the basel agreement of 1988

do real exchange rates follow a nonlinear mean reverting process in developing countries in an effort to fight relatively high inflation many developing countries try to manage their nominal exchange rates through official intervention in addition developing countries tend to have high transportation costs tariffs and nontariff barriers these factors are among the sources of generating nonlinearity in real exchange rates and hence some nonlinear adjustment toward purchasing power parity ppp in developing countries in this paper we employ monthly real effective exchange rate reer data of 88 developing countries and test the null of nonstationarity versus an alternative of linear stationarity by the means of a conventional unit root test and compare the results with those obtained from a new test in which the null is the same but the alternative hypothesis is nonlinear stationarity the latter test supports the ppp theory in more developing countries compared with the former test suggesting that nonlinear adjustment toward ppp in developing countries is an important phenomenon reported country characterizations indicate that reversion in reer occurs more often for high inflation countries and for countries with high flexibility in their exchange rates

long run purchasing power parity in the 1920s abstract this paper presents an empirical analysis of long run purchasing power parity ppp during the 1920s float using recently developed methodology on the cointegration of economic time series our results are generally supportive of ppp as a long run equilibrium condition on which exchange rates tended to converge over the period for dollar sterling however there is some evidence of a non stationary drift away from fundamentals during the last year or so before britain s return to the gold standard perhaps due to speculation our results also appear to reconcile some apparently conflicting evidence in the literature

the elasticity of scale and the shape of average costs different concepts of returns to scale the first which is most widely used for defining returns to scale is the relative increase in output as all input quantities are increased proportionally along a ray through the origin the second which is the more relevant concept for micro economic analysis is the increase in output relative to costs for variations along the expansion path where input prices are constant and costs are minimized at every output 2 as it turns out these two concepts yield equal measures for the elasticity of scale3 e at every minimum cost point in the input space however the change in e with output is generally different for the two concepts 4 since expansion paths do not coincide with rays unless the production function is homothetic 5 but it is the change of e along the expansion path and not along the raywhich determines the shape of the average cost curve ac and which is therefore relevant for the analysis of firms and industry behavior under competition 6 these relations are stated and analyzed below it is shown that assumptions made in the literature7 which are related to the behavior of e along rays or to the slope of the technically optimal surface where returns to scale are locally constant are irrelevantbeing neither necessary nor sufficient for implying classical u shaped average cost curves the following definitions and results are used here

purchasing power parity and the canadian float in the 1950s in this paper the authors present evidence that neither large differences in inflation nor long time periods are necessary for a finding favorable to purchasing power parity evidence from cointegrating regressions and tests of the real exchange rate indicate that purchasing power parity held as a long run constraint between the united states and canada for the period 1950 10 to 1961 5 the authors also find that government intervention can distort purchasing power parity over a finite period once the data were extended beyond the period of the free float the evidence is no longer favorable to purchasing power parity copyright 1991 by mit press

validity of purchasing power parity for selected latin american countries linear and non linear unit root tests abstract the aim of this study is to examine empirically the validity of ppp in the context of unit root tests based on linear and non linear models of the real effective exchange rate of argentina brazil chile colombia mexico peru and venezuela for this purpose we apply the harvey et al 2008 linearity test and the non linear unit root test kruse 2011 the results show that the series with linear characteristics are argentina brazil chile colombia and peru and those with non linear characteristics are mexico and venezuela the linear unit root tests indicate that the real effective exchange rate is stationary for chile and peru and the non linear unit root tests evidence that mexico is stationary in the period analyzed the results show support for the validity of ppp in only three of the seven countries

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

scale economies and inefficiency of u s dairy farms this study employs data drawn from the 2000 agricultural resource management survey a u s department of agriculture sponsored farmers survey the article estimates returns to scale relationships across dairy farms of different sizes and across different regions incorporating variables hypothesized to influence farm performance results point to significant scale economies in u s dairy farms and underscore the importance of taking account of inefficiency when estimating scale economies contrary to previous research the preferred cost function specification does not show a region of decreasing returns to scale this finding helps explain why the average size of dairy farms has been increasing

technical scale and allocative efficiencies in u s banking an empirical investigation a nonparametric frontier approach is used to calculate the overall technical pure technical allocative and scale efficiencies for a sample of 322 independent banks the sample was drawn from the federal deposit insurance corporation tapes on the reports of condition and reports of income call reports for the year 1986 the results indicated a low level of overall efficiency the main source of inefficiency was technical in nature rather than allocative separate efficiency frontiers were constructed to test the effect of branching however the distributions of efficiency measures for branching and non branching banks were not found to be different

reinsuring risk to increase access to health insurance at least 41 million americans are currently without health insurance in any given month u s bureau of the census 2002 they are uninsured for a variety of reasons and most people who lack coverage are affected by more than one reason two generalizations can be made however first a majority simply cannot afford to purchase health insurance unless it is heavily subsidized most do not have access to employer sponsored coverage and so must purchase any insurance in the non group individual health insurance market a market where as i explain below insurance is typically twice as expensive as employer group coverage if it is not denied outright since about two thirds of the uninsured have incomes below 35 000 non group health insurance premiums often exceed 10 percent of their incomes the second generalization is that to an important extent high premiums in the non group market and denial of coverage reflect market failure due to asymmetric information insurers can never know as much as an individual does about his or her health family history of health problems and tendency to seek medical care because of this asymmetry it is impossible for an insurer to set premiums that accurately reflect the non random portion of health care costs for different individuals the non group market is the only health insurance option for people without employersponsored coverage tax related subsidies as proposed by members of congress and the bush administration do not address the market failure problems and so are unlikely to make insurance much more affordable to increase access to health insurance risk in the non group market needs to be shifted to a broader population base in what follows i first describe the three distinct health insurance markets in which people can obtain health insurance and the special nature of competition among insurance companies in the non group market then i make the case for government to act as reinsurer and assume the risk of extremely high cost people efficiency in the non group health insurance market would be improved if the government reinsured the market equity also would be increased if the government acted as reinsurer because more uninsured people would have access to insurance finally i describe precedents for this role for government in other markets and why tax related subsidies will not succeed in increasing health insurance coverage unless the risks of extremely high costs are shifted to the government

bank employment in the world s largest banks an update note in this paper we replicate two studies published in this journal twelve and thirteen years ago short 1971 and kaufman 1970 the results indicate that there may indeed have been substantial gains in labor productivity among the world s largest banks over the period 1967 79 moreover the gains were greater for the smaller banks in our sample than for the larger ones because banking has traditionally been regarded as a highly labor intensive industry the general assumption has been that productivity gains in banking would be hard to achieve and even harder to identify baumol and oates 1972 ascribed the source of rising costs or a cost disease in service industries to the lagging technical progress there vis a vis other industries in the economy several attempts have been made to investigate this thesis with respect to banking with mixed results kinsella 1973 found that the growth in labor productivity in banking in ireland during the 1960 71 period confirmed the baumol oates 1972 hypothesis how

allocative distortions technical progress and input demand in u s airlines 1970 1984 this paper generalizes a globally concave and flexible cost function to accommodate allocative distortions these distortions are introduced through shadow prices and are specified as functions of regressors that make distortion factors firm input and time specific the estimated model based on a panel of nineteen u s airlines observed during 1970 84 rejects the hypothesis of no allocative distortions increase in costs due to allocative distortions are calculated for each airline over the entire period the rate of technical progress and economies of scale are also estimated based on models with and without allocative distortions copyright 1992 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

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

a panel project on purchasing power parity mean reversion within and between countries abstract previous time series studies have shown evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates deviations from purchasing power parity ppp appear to have half lives of approximately four years however the long samples required for statistical significance are unavailable for most currencies and are potentially inappropriate because of regime changes in this study we re examine deviations from ppp using a panel of 150 countries and 45 annual post wwii observations our panel shows strong evidence of mean reversion that is similar to that from long time series ppp deviations are eroded at a rate of approximately 15 annually i e their half life is around four years such findings can be masked in time series data but are relatively easy to find in cross sections

production efficiency of british building societies the purpose of this paper is to examine the relative efficiency of british building societies and to find out whether efficiency factor is the driving force behind the merging of small building societies efficiency indices for societies are derived from a 1981 sample of cross section data the results indicate wide disparities in efficiency these differences are not related to the size of building societies but apparently to managers skill and motivation

quantile unit root test and ppp evidence from 23 oecd countries abstractapplication of six different univariate unit root tests to real effective exchange rates of 23 oecd countries supports their stationarity or purchasing power parity theory ppp only in five countries a result consistent with previous research that is known as ppp puzzle however descriptive statistics of each effective rate reveals a clear sign of non normal distribution to account for this we use quantile unit root test which allows impact of different shocks to be realized at different quantiles when we applied this new test to the same rates number of countries in which ppp is supported increased to 16 apparently incorporating effects of shocks improves testing efficiency and provides more support for the ppp and reduces the severity of the puzzle

competition in fragmented markets new evidence from the german banking industry in the light of the subprime crisis abstract of all of the eu member states germany has the largest banking market however not all german banking institutions necessarily face fierce competition because the industry is highly fragmented strict separation of the three existing banking pillars may impede competition with negative effects on financial stability we assess the competitive stances of 1 888 universal banks from 2001 to 2009 by using the panzar rosse revenue test we find evidence that measuring competition at an average country level does not necessarily generate valid evaluations of fragmented markets in addition we find no clear indication that either the particular objectives of cooperative and savings banks or the legal protection of these institutions impedes competition or discriminates against private banks therefore as long as the relationship between competition and financial stability is dubious the overall effect and the social costs or benefits of political measures that influence the structure of the german banking market are at least questionable

a general index of technical change this paper outlines a procedure for estimating a general index of technical change within the context of a quite general production technology specifically when panel data are available for firms in an industry time specific dummies can be combined in a nonlinear estimation procedure to yield a general index of technical change that may be both nonneutral and scale augmenting this approach offers numerous advantages over the traditional time trend representation of technical change for example the general index can serve as the basis for analysis of the determinants of technical change results for a sample of 30 electric utilities over the period 1951 78 show that the productivity decline of the 1970s can be attributed primarily to sulphur oxide restrictions and secularly declining capacity utilization due to rapidly increasing peak load demands

deregulation ownership and productivity growth in the banking industry evidence from india this paper analyzes the relationship between deregulation and total factor productivity tfp growth in the indian banking industry using a generalized shadow cost function approach tfp growth is decomposed into a technological change a scale and a miscellaneous component a disaggregated panel data analysis using the population of public and private banks over 1985 96 that covers both pre and post deregulation periods indicates that a significant decline in regulatory distortions and the anticipated increase in tfp growth have not yet materialized following deregulation while private sector banks have improved their performance mainly due to the freedom to expand output public sector banks have not responded well to the deregulation measures

shephard s lemma and rate of return regulation abstract by counter example this paper shows that in general shephard s lemma cannot be used for the usual formulation of the rate of return regulated cost function a solution to the problem is supplied

searching for stationarity purchasing power parity under the current float abstract using panel data methods we investigate long run purchasing power parity by testing for unit roots in real exchange rates of industrial countries under the current float the evidence against the unit root hypothesis is stronger for larger than for smaller panels for monthly than for quarterly data and when the german mark rather than the united states dollar is used as the base currency while we find that accounting for serial correlation considerably weakens the evidence against the unit root null the results as a whole are consistent with long run purchasing power parity

efficiency in the commercial banking industry a production frontier approach 1990 efficiency in the commercial banking industry a production frontier approach applied economics vol 22 no 4 pp 539 551

an examination of the effect of ownership on the relative efficiency of public and private water utilities the behavior of privately and publicly owned water utilities is examined by estimating a generalized variable cost function containing the regular characteristics of the neoclassical cost function without requiring that cost minimization subject to market prices be imposed as a maintained hypothesis assuming that unobserved shadow prices reflect the regulatory environment of the water industry tests for cost minimization are obtained by deriving shadow prices as functions of market prices the empirical results provide evidence that public water utilities are more efficient than private utilities on average but are more widely dispersed between best and worst practice

towards solving the ppp puzzle evidence from 113 countries several different approaches have been followed by researchers to test the validity of purchasing power parity ppp since the introduction of the unit root tests researchers have applied a battery of these tests to determine whether the real exchange rates are stationary if the answer is in the affirmative ppp is validated while application of the standard augmented dickey fuller test has not provided much support for ppp a test that incorporates nonlinearity in the rates has under both tests however the null of nonstationary is tested against the alternative of stationarity in this article when we switch the null with the alternative and apply kwiatkowski et al 1992 test we provide relatively more support for the theory getting closer and closer towards solving the ppp puzzle

the overvaluation of purchasing power parity abstract recent panel studies of purchasing power parity have reported strong evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates however these studies fail to control for cross sectional dependence in the data this failure has dramatic consequences raising the significance level of tests with a nominal size of 5 percent to as much as 50 percent it is shown in this paper that controlling for cross sectional dependence no evidence against the random walk null can be found in panels of up to 64 real exchange rates this finding cannot be attributed to low power as there is ample power in panels of this size to reject the unit root null