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

multi directional efficiency analysis of efficiency patterns in chinese banks 1997 2008 dea type efficiency studies are often used to investigate levels of efficiencies differences in those levels between subgroups within a data set and possible determinants of such differences in the current paper we show how differences in the efficiency patterns between different subgroups within a data set can be investigated using the more recent mea methodology we specifically look at the case of joint stock banks and state owned banks in china and are able to empirically test hypotheses of whether there are differences not only in the levels but also in the patterns of inefficiencies between the two types of banks that is which variables the inefficiencies are located on we argue that certain differences are expected based on differences in objectives and constraints in the two types of banks and find empirical support for most of those expected patterns

efficiency analysis in banking firms an international comparison abstract the intensive process of financial european integration together with the profound transformation and deregulation that has taken place in the spanish banking system justifies the evaluation of its efficiency in comparison with that of other banking systems in this context the aim of this study is to analyze the productivity efficiency and differences in technology of several banking systems using a non parametric approach together with the malmquist index we compare the efficiency productivity and differences in technology of different european and us banking systems for the year 1992

the technical efficiency of large bank production abstract significant difficulties in commercial banking in the late 1980s raise questions about bank performance and efficiency with the use of data envelopment analysis dea we consider the relative technical efficiency of 201 large banks from 1984 to 1990 bank technical inefficiency averages just over 5 percent much lower than found in existing estimates larger and more profitable banks have higher levels of technical efficiency at the same time however larger banks are more likely to operate under decreasing returns to scale

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

jobless spells and re employment wages many studies of job loss attribute the earnings losses associated with layoffs to the loss of job occupation and industry specific human capital this paper estimates the effect of jobless spells on post layoff wages using data from the 1984 panel of survey on income participation for a sample of adult white male workers who were permanently laid off between 1974 and 1984 the estimated impact of jobless spells on starting wages and survey date wages several years after re employment are controlled for separations layoffs and quits and for individual and job characteristics the estimates show that jobless spell durations reduce starting wages wage growth in the new job is lower for workers who experience long spell durations a result that suggests acceptance of jobs which are poor matches compared to other workers who spend less time out of work following a layoff the findings support labour force policies which minimize the amount of time a person is out of work

productivity and efficiency at large and community banks in the us a bayesian true random effects stochastic distance frontier analysis this paper compares the productivity and efficiency of large banks and community banks in the united states over the period 1997 2006 this comparison is performed by estimating a true random effects stochastic distance frontier model a model that is capable of disentangling unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency within a bayesian framework we find that failure to consider unobserved heterogeneity results in a misleading ranking of banks and mismeasured technical efficiency productivity growth and returns to scale our results show that compared with community banks large banks have experienced much higher productivity growth and higher levels of returns to scale our estimates of total factor productivity growth show a clear downward trend for both large and community banks and our decomposition of the output distance function based divisia productivity index indicates that technical change is the driving force behind this trend

using stochastic frontier analysis to measure the impact of weather on the efficiency of electricity distribution businesses in developing economies abstract this paper analyses the influence of weather variables on the efficiency of electricity distribution companies in argentina brazil chile and peru covering 82 firms which represent more than 90 percent of the distribution market of energy delivered for the period 1998 2008 stochastic frontier analysis sfa is applied using a translog input distance function two different approaches are evaluated weather in the production function and weather in the inefficiency term the efficacy of one over the other is determined using nested models weather data are collected from meteorological stations 429 and nasa 3423 coordinates a geographic information system gis is used for locating the firms service areas and their weather conditions a combination of cost only and cost quality models is proposed for cost only models the results suggest that on average there is a significant increase in measured efficiency when weather is incorporated in the production function under the cost quality models on average the effect of weather is much lower this suggests that firms have internalised the effects of weather and have adapted their networks to the environment in which they operate a company level analysis indicates that across models a significant number of companies are affected by weather regulators are advised to make proper adjustments of efficiency scores when specific firms face important efficiency changes due to weather

consequences of deregulation for commercial banking in recent years many of the restrictions on banking activities adopted following the banking collapse of the 1930s have been eroded by improvements in technology and high interest rates which led to increasing direct competition from unregulated institutions beginning in the 1970s the regulatory agencies state legislatures and the congress have moved to liberalize these restrictions based on research on economies of scale and scope the experience of the conglomerate merger movement of the 1950s and 1960s the observed effects of changes in state laws governing branches and holding companies foreign experience and experience in other industries that underwent deregulation banking deregulation is likely to lead to reductions in the number of banks and increases in their efficiency geographic scope and product diversification such an outcome is consistent with the survival of a large number and variety of financial institutions and need not endanger the safety of the banking system over the past two decades the markets for financial services have provided a fascinating laboratory in which to observe the interplay of market forces political responses to crises and the maneuvering of interested parties in shaping public policy toward an entire industry in the process a regulatory framework put in place a half century ago has been partly dismantled and is likely to be modified further perhaps even more dramatically in the years to come this paper reviews the progress of deregulation to date attempts to discern its implications for the future shape of the financial system in particular commercial banking and poses several questions of public policy

immigration policy with partisan parties this paper analyzes the political economy of immigration when the salient electoral issue is the level of immigrants and the relevant immigration policy is the expenditure in immigration control we consider that immigration affects voters welfare through economic and non economic factors we model political competition a la wittman with the ideology of parties endogenously determined at equilibrium numerical simulations provide the levels of immigration proposed by the two parties and the composition of parties constituencies at equilibrium parties propose different levels of immigration located to the left and to the right of the median voter s ideal point we find that improvements in the efficacy of immigration control increases the probability of victory of the party proposing a tighter immigration policy and decreases the disparity in parties policy proposals

mismatch between unemployment and vacancies in the dutch labour market we analyse the importance of educational mismatch between vacancies and unemployment in the dutch labour market using unemployment and vacancy data by educational level we estimate a matching function which incorporates the effect of educational mismatch on the aggregate flow of filled vacancies using the estimated parameters we calculate how much of total unemployment can be attributed to educational mismatch the results indicate that educational mismatch is not an important determinant of unemployment in the netherlands moreover it shows a remarkable trend contrary to common belief the relative importance of mismatch appears to have strongly decreased since the end of the 1960s

sensitivity analysis of efficiency and malmquist productivity indices an application to spanish savings banks abstract hypothesis testing and statistical precision in the context of non parametric efficiency and productivity measurement have been investigated since the early 1990s recent contributions focus on this matter through the use of resampling methods i e bootstrapping techniques however empirical evidence is still practically non existent this gap is more noticeable in the case of banking efficiency studies where the literature is immense in this work we explore productivity growth and productive efficiency for spanish savings banks over the initial post deregulation period 1992 1998 using data envelopment analysis dea and bootstrapping techniques results show that productivity growth has occurred mainly due to improvement in production possibilities and that mean efficiency has remained fairly constant over time the bootstrap analysis yields further evidence as for many firms productivity growth or decline is not statistically significant with regard to efficiency measurement the bootstrap reveals that the disparities in the original efficiency scores of some firms are lessened to a great extent

evaluating unemployment policies what do the underlying theories tell us the paper surveys unemployment policies for advanced market economies and evaluates them by examining the predictions of the underlying macroeconomic theories the basic idea is that for the most part different unemployment policy prescriptions rest on different macroeconomic theories and our confidence in the prescriptions should depend at least in part on theories ability to predict some salient stylized facts about unemployment behavior the paper considers four types of policies laissez faire demand management policies supply side policies and structural policies copyright 1995 by oxford university press

who is against immigration a cross country investigation of individual attitudes toward immigrants abstract this paper empirically analyzes economic and noneconomic determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants within and across countries the two survey data sets used covering a wide range of developed and developing countries make it possible to test for interactive effects between individual characteristics and country level attributes in particular theory predicts that the correlation between pro immigration attitudes and individual skill should be related to the skill composition of natives relative to immigrants in the destination country skilled individuals should favor immigration in countries where natives are more skilled than immigrants and oppose it otherwise results based on direct and indirect measures of the relative skill composition are consistent with these predictions noneconomic variables also are correlated with immigration attitudes but they don t alter significantly the labor market results

regional growth and finance in europe is there a quality effect of bank efficiency abstract in this study we test whether regional growth in 11 european countries depends on financial development and suggest the use of cost and profit efficiency estimates as quality measures of financial institutions contrary to the usual quantitative proxies of financial development the quality of financial institutions is measured in this study as the relative ability of banks to intermediate funds an improvement in bank efficiency spurs five times more regional growth then an identical increase in credit does more credit provided by efficient banks exerts an independent growth effect in addition to direct quantity and quality channel effects

a two tiered earnings frontier estimation of employer and employee information in the labor market this pap er develops a two tiered frontier estimation procedure to decompose the residual of an earnings function into three components the first component can be interpreted as being purely random search theory is used to show that the other two components represent employee and employer ignorance of offer and reservation wages respectively relative employee and employer ignorance estimates are presented for various population strata copyright 1987 by mit press

the dominance of inefficiencies over scale and product mix economies in banking abstract this study measures and analyzes inefficiencies for all u s banks in 1984 inefficiencies are measured relative to a thick frontier cost function and are found to dominate measured scale and product mix economies most inefficiencies are operational in nature involving the overuse of physical inputs rather than financial involving overpayment of interest also technical inefficiencies proportionate overuse of all inputs dominate allocative inefficiencies improper mix of inputs these results suggest that competitive pressures in banking from deregulation will be focused primarily on banks that do not control costs rather than on those of a particular size or product mix

successful employer search an empirical analysis of vacancy duration using micro data this paper provides the first estimates of the determinants of the duration of employer search in the uk we model duration until a vacancy is either successfully filled or withdrawn from the market the econometric techniques deal with multiple vacancies and unobserved heterogeneity dependent risks using flexible and parametric baseline hazards the hazards to filling and withdrawing exhibit negative and positive duration dependence respectively implying that the conditional probability of successful employer search decreases with duration we also find that nonmanual vacancies are less likely to fill consistent with there being skill shortages in the sample period

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

voting for voters a model of electoral evolution we model the decision problems faced by the members of societies whose new members are determined by vote we adopt a number of simplifying assumptions the founders and the candidates are fixed the society operates for k periods and holds elections at the beginning of each period one vote is sufficient for admission and voters can support as many candidates as they wish voters assess the value of the streams of agents with whom they share the society while they belong to it in spite of these simplifications we show that interesting strategic behavior is implied by the dynamic structure of the problem the vote for friends may be postponed and it may be advantageous to vote for enemies we discuss the existence of different types of equilibria in pure strategies and point out interesting equilibria in mixed strategies

the impact of macroeconomic and regulatory factors on bank efficiency a non parametric analysis of hong kong s banking system abstract this paper assesses the relative technical efficiency of institutions operating in a market that has been significantly affected by environmental and market factors in recent years the hong kong banking system these environmental factors are specifically incorporated into the efficiency analysis using the innovative slacks based second stage tobit regression approach advocated by fried et al fried h o schmidt s s yaisawarng s 1999 incorporating the operating environment into a nonparametric measure of technical efficiency journal of productivity analysis 12 249 267 a further innovation is that we also employ tone s tone k 2001 a slacks based measure of efficiency in data envelopment analysis european journal of operational research 130 498 509 slacks based model sbm to conduct the data envelopment analysis dea in addition to the more traditional approach attributable to banker charnes and cooper bcc banker r d charnes a cooper w w 1984 some models for estimating technical and scale efficiencies in data envelopment analysis management science 30 1078 1092 the results indicate high levels of technical inefficiency for many institutions considerable variations in efficiency levels and trends across size groups and banking sectors and also differential impacts of environmental factors on different size groups and financial sectors surprisingly the accession of hong kong to the people s republic of china episodes of financial deregulation and the 1997 1998 south east asian crisis do not seem to have had a significant independent impact on relative efficiency however the results suggest that the impact of the last mentioned may have come via the adverse developments in the macroeconomy and in the housing market

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

immigration conflict and redistribution we study how the possibility of a conflict between natives and immigrants shapes income redistribution in democracies conflict erupts when immigrants are given less than what they could obtain by resorting to confrontation that in turn can make natives vote for lower tax rates and lower public spending we show that income redistribution both vertical from the rich to the poor and horizontal from natives to migrants decreases with the level of immigration this is because the threat of conflict intensifies as the migrant population becomes bigger inequality softens the effect of immigration on tax rates but reduces horizontal redistribution despite the threat of conflict the welfare of the native population unambiguously increases with the stock of migrants

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

a dynamic stochastic frontier model to evaluate regional financial efficiency evidence from chinese county level panel data abstract studies have widely used stochastic frontier models to assess financial efficiency however traditional static approaches do not take dynamic characteristics of financial systems into account this article develops a dynamic stochastic frontier model to evaluate regional financial efficiency and provides an empirical test of the model by using panel data of 62 chinese counties during the 2001 2010 period the model measures the dynamic impact of the input output variables and environmental variables on financial efficiency and allows for the separation of technical change from the change in technical efficiency the results show that the dynamic model provides a better fit to the data than the static model in addition a gradient difference emerges in the regional financial efficiency among the six major regions of china the results offer practical implications for the development of regional financial services in china as well as other developing countries and emerging economies

using data envelopment analysis for costing bank products an important problem that many banks face is to provide satisfactory cost estimates for the variety of products and services they offer accurate product cost estimates can be used to support better product mix and pricing decisions in this paper we present a method for providing efficient and reliable cost estimates of bank products at the branch level based on the non parametric benchmarking technique of data envelopment analysis dea results from an empirical study undertaken in a banking environment to demonstrate the applicability of the method are also presented

the geographical concentration of labour market disadvantage this paper argues that british welfare to work policies are inadequate given the geographical concentration of worklessness in northern regions and in cities and former coalfields while unemployment has been converging geographically inactivity has not all the welfare to work target groups youth unemployed long term unemployed lone parents the long term sick and partners of the unemployed have closely similar geographical distributions official arguments that there are adequate job vacancies everywhere are shown to be flawed the geography of worklessness is largely explained by the weakness of adjustment through migration and commuting to the loss of jobs in manufacturing and mining the cities being particularly affected by urban rural manufacturing shift policy needs to promote more relevant employment in high unemployment areas through increased spending on derelict land reclamation transport and other infrastructure the case for more supportive policies towards manufacturing should also be considered

unemployment vs mismatch of talents reconsidering unemployment benefits we develop an equilibrium search matching model with risk neutral agents and two sided ex ante heterogeneity unemployment insurance has the standard effect of reducing employment but also helps workers to get a suitable job we show through calibrations how the mere difference on unemployment insurance when countries experience a common skilled biased technological shock may result in differences in unemployment productivity growth and wage inequality these results are consistent with the contrasting performance of the labour market in europe and the united states in the last twenty five years the model is used to address some political economy issues

do bank mergers have hidden or foregone value realized and unrealized operating synergies in one bank merger abstract recent mergers in the banking industry have often generated disappointing shareholder returns delays in implementing potential operating savings and realizing benefits of scale economies may be one reason these mergers have disappointing returns using data envelopment analysis dea we analyze a 200 branch network formed in a merger of four banks the operating efficiency of each branch is benchmarked against best practice branches in the combined merged bank as well as best practice branches within each pre merger bank this analysis identified opportunities to reduce branch operating costs by 22 percent for the entire merged bank in contrast the cost savings opportunity is under seven percent when analyzed within each pre merger bank these findings suggest benchmarking across the entire merged bank to identify the best practices bank wide can generate added savings however in this bank merger these merger benefits were not realized until four years after the merger interviews with key players in the merged bank indicate that the bank deferred realizing these benefits because of political pressures personnel integration issues system integration issues and financial components of the merger such as restructuring reserves and the purchase price these causes suggest areas where shareholders can and should demand more rapid improvement in performance of bank mergers and areas for future corporate merger research

vacancy durations a model for employer s search this paper investigates a dutch data set on vacancy durations and numbers of applicants to enquire employers search strategies a nonsequential search process assumes that most vacancies are filled from a pool of applicants which is formed shortly after the posting of the vacancy the time spent on recruiting applicants and the duration of the selection process are estimated with a proportional hazard model via the arrival and attrition rates of applicants

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

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

an examination of cost structure and production performance of commercial banks in singapore abstract this paper uses a parametric approach in the framework of a translog cost function and a non parametric approach in the framework of linear programming to examine production performance and cost structure of a sample of singaporean commercial banks the results of the parametric methodology suggest that the average cost curve of these banks is u shaped and there are economies of scale for small and medium size banks further analysis provides evidence of economies of scope for all banks regardless of their size the non parametric results indicate that the singaporean banks could have reduced cost by 43 had they all been overall efficient the sources of this cost inefficiency seem to be caused equally by allocative and technical inefficiencies

manufacturing growth and financial development evidence from oecd countries recent theoretical models conjecture that the development of the financial sector is essential for economic growth we investigate this hypothesis from a time series perspective and find that financial sector gdp is cointegrated for many oecd countries not so much with manufacturing gdp but mostly with manufacturing total factor productivity moreover this relation is in some instances characterized by long run causality in the sense of granger and lin however even within this homogeneous group of countries the variety of results suggests a more complex picture than is apparent from cross sectional evidence

exclusion unemployment and non employment green a e 1997 exclusion unemployment and non employment reg studies 31 505 520 this paper provides an overview of selected issues pertinent to an examination of comparative experiences of exclusion with foremost emphasis on the labour market dimension of exclusion notably unemployment and non employment the way in which losers and winners emerge as a result of changes in the socio economic environment is outlined with particular attention paid to identification of who the losers are and where they are located specific remarks and empirical details of the uk experience are used for illustrative purposes but much of the discussion relates to the situation in european union countries more generally drawing on this review some of the issues surrounding the identification and measurement of the unemployed and non employed are explored and the need for a range of alternative indicators and methodological perspectives on labour market exclusion is discussed finally some of the issues r

the impact of liberalization on the productive efficiency of indian commercial banks abstract we examine the productive efficiency of 70 indian commercial banks during the early stages 1986 1991 of the ongoing period of liberalization we use data envelopment analysis to calculate radial technical efficiency scores we then use stochastic frontier analysis to attribute variation in the calculated efficiency scores to three sources a temporal component an ownership component and a random noise component we find publicly owned indian banks to have been the most efficient followed by foreign owned banks and privately owned indian banks we also find a temporal improvement in the performance of foreign owned banks virtually no trend in the performance of privately owned indian banks and a temporal decline in the performance of publicly owned indian banks we attempt to explain these patterns in terms of the government s evolving regulatory policies

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

skill mismatch and unemployment we consider a finite number of heterogeneous firms which compete imperfectly for heterogeneous workers we show that unemployment may arise in equilibrium because of job mismatch and firms market power

mismatch in local labour markets in central scotland the neglected role of demand this paper presents a model of mismatch unemployment in two local labour markets in scotland a total of seven possible sources of such unemployment are identified and examined within the context of a predominantly urban area and a mixed urban rural area these are contiguous travel to work areas ttwas the paper attempts to identify what causes recruitment difficulties and discusses the extent to which the problem is demand induced a survey of employer practices and attitudes is followed up by multiple regression analysis to determine the effect of these practices on vacancy duration the analysis shows that there are certain recruitment practices and inherent characteristics of employers which result in job offers that are either unattractive or inaccessible to the unemployed it is argued that design of policy for implementation at the local level needs to take account more explicitly of the demand side of the local labour market than has so far been evident in the uk approach to the skill mismatch issue

searching for the effect of immigration on the labor market we compare two approaches to analyzing the effects of immigration on the labor market and find that the estimated effect of immigration on u s native labor outcomes depends critically on the empirical experiment used area analyses contrast the level or change in immigration by area with the level or change in the outcomes of non immigrant workers factor proportions analyses treat immigrants as a source of increased national supply of workers of the relevant skill the different effects of immigration on native outcomes in the area and factor proportions methodologies appear to result from the diluting effect of native migration flows across regions and failure to take adequate account of other regional labor market conditions in area comparisons excerpt

markets market failures and development a central question in development economics is how can we account for differences in the levels of income and the rates of growth between the developed and less developed economies in the 1950s and 1960s there was a standard answer to this question the poor are just like the rich except they are poorer they have less human and nonhuman capital there was an immediate prescription for this diagnosis increase the resources of ldcs either by transferring capital to them either direct aid or education or by encouraging them to save more today these answers seem less convincing that they did two decades ago if the problem were primarily a shortage of physical capital the return to capital should be much higher in ldcs than in developed countries and the natural avarice of capitalists would lead to a flow of capital from the more developed to the less developed economies see howard pack 1984 and my 1988 paper if the problem were primarily a shortage of human capital then the educated in ldcs should receive a higher absolute as well as relative income than the educated in more developed economies how then can we account for high levels of unemployment among the educated and the migration of the educated from ldcs to more developed economies moreover the predictions of the standard neoclassical growth model of a convergence of growth rates in per capita income with permanent differences in per capita consumption being explained by differences in savings rates and reproduction rates do not seem to have been borne out these observations suggest that the ldcs differ from the developed countries in at least some other important respects and this view is corroborated by those studies which have looked at the productivity of similar plants operating in developed and less developed economies see pack 1984 1987 the difference can be attributed perhaps tautologically to differences in economic organization to how individuals factors of production interact and to the institutions which mediate those interactions among the most important of these institutions are markets it is by now well recognized that there are many instances of market failures in more developed economies see bruce greenwald and myself 1986 in some cases market failures may be ameliorated by nonmarket institutions if for instance capital markets do not function well perfectly if only because of costly and imperfect information nonmarket institutions internal capital markets within large conglomerates may develop market failure is more prevalent in ldcs and the nonmarket institutions that ameliorate its consequences are at least in many instances less successful in doing so the objective of this paper is to explore the causes and consequences of these market failures and the failure of private nonmarket solutions and to suggest possible roles for government intervention tdiscussants anne 0 krueger duke university stanley fischer world bank

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

the concept of employability the concept of employability plays a crucial role in informing labour market policy in the uk the eu and beyond this paper analyses current and previous applications of the term and discusses its value as an exploratory concept and a framework for policy analysis it then traces the development of the concept discusses its role in current labour market and training strategies with particular reference to the uk and seeks to identify an approach to defining employability that can better inform labour market policy by transcending explanations of employment and unemployment that focus solely on either supply side or demand side factors although the literature offers a range of definitions of employability many policy makers have recently used the term as shorthand for the individual s employability skills and attributes it is argued that this narrow usage can lead to a hollowing out of the concept of employability the paper concludes by presenting a broad framework for analysing employability built around individual factors personal circumstances and external factors which acknowledges the importance of both supply and demand side factors

efficiency measurement in the stochastic frontier model abstract deterministic models of technical efficiency assume that all deviations from the production frontier are due to inefficiency critics argue that no allowance is made for measurement error and other statistical noise so that the resulting efficiency measure will be contaminated the stochastic frontier model is an alternative that allows both inefficiency and measurement error advocates argue that the stochastic frontier models should be used despite other potential limitations because of the superior conceptual treatment of noise as will be demonstrated in this paper however the assumed shape of the error distributions is used to identify a key production function parameter therefore the stochastic frontier models like the deterministic models cannot produce absolute measures of efficiency moreover we show that rankings for firm specific inefficiency estimates produced by traditional stochastic frontier models do not change from the rankings of the composed errors as a result the performance of the deterministic models is qualitatively similar to that of the stochastic frontier models

world financial crisis and efficiency of chinese commercial banks the us credit crunch generated substantial turmoil in the global financial markets and directly caused the collapse of several world banking giants nonetheless chinese commercial banks decoupled from the rest of the world achieved remarkable results because of their risk averse nature and banking reform during the past 10 years to improve corporate governance and efficiency the latest reform was focused on ownership transformation via foreign participation and stock listing employing data of 14 listed chinese banks during the period 1999 2008 this paper tests whether ipo was an effective way to enhance banks efficiency using two frontier approaches data envelopment analysis and sfa the results confirm our hypothesis and suggest that restructuring banks into shareholding companies improves both technical efficiency and scale economies this conclusion is further confirmed by the technical inefficiency effects model which found that efficiency rating of listed banks was about 5 per cent higher than their prior ipo level facing tougher economic condition and increased competition banks not only need to broaden income sources cut expenditures but more importantly to strengthen their risk management to become more resistant to a volatile business environment

an integrated performance evaluation of financial holding companies in taiwan abstract there has been a worldwide trend for financial institutions to become larger in scale and more diversified in scope with taiwan being no exception fourteen financial holding companies fhcs have each begun to function as a management umbrella in taiwan by investing in different types of financial services such as banking insurance and securities this paper focuses on this local financing issue from an integrated methodological perspective by model innovations proposed in several earlier studies for example the efficiency of profitability and marketability are combined to evaluate the fhcs performance to conduct a valid and reliable evaluation process while applying the fhc s case in taiwan we integrate the slacks based measure sbm and slacks based measure of super efficiency super sbm models in order to directly handle the slacks and identify the best performers a new scheme that deals with the negative output data in the sbm super sbm is also introduced inter temporal efficiency change which is decomposed into catch up and frontier shift effects is analyzed by means of the sbm based malmquist index a decision making matrix is also presented to help the fhcs managerial authorities position themselves in the industry the above techniques show with a high degree of consistency that large sized fhcs perform better than small sized ones