competition increases x efficiency a limited liability mechanism the main result of this study is that a financial constraint may serve as a disciplining device on the internal efficiency of a firm and the tougher the product market competition the higher the disciplining power this limited liability mechanism may in part account for the alleged disciplining power of product market competition on firm efficiency however even if policies that promote competition enhance x efficiency the gain may be outweighed by a less efficient allocation of risk moreover this adverse risk effect has repercussions implying that the effect of reduced entry barriers on competition and consumer s welfare is small

foreign currency denominated borrowing in the absence of operating incentives abstract it is well known that corporations issue foreign currency denominated debt to hedge foreign currency cash flows with offsetting interest payments we test an alternative opportunistic motive for foreign currency denominated borrowing we do so by constructing a comprehensive sample of foreign currency denominated bonds issued by sovereign government and agency issuers with no foreign currency cash flows or foreign operations we find strong and consistent evidence that the borrowers in our sample consider cross currency differences in covered and uncovered interest yields in choosing the currency in which to denominate their international debt we estimate the average gains to opportunistic covered yield borrowing to be 4 to 18 basis points interestingly we also find that the average bond offering in our sample precedes a large and beneficial depreciation of the issue currency over the course of the following year these results support what has been a frequent conjecture in the foreign debt market

a note on endogenous firm efficiency in cournot models of incomplete information abstract martin models cournot firms with informational asymmetries on costs to investigate the relation betweenx inefficiency and the number of firms he argues that an increase in the number of competitors decreases firm efficiency we show that his results hold in a complete information model they are due to the implicit assumption of increasing returns to scale we further argue that a setting of adverse selection on cost and of ex post cost observability tends to isolate the intrafirm agency problem from what happens inside the product market leaving firm efficiency unaffected by the degree of competition journal of economic literatureclassification numbers l13 l22 d82

competition risk and managerial incentives this paper examines how the degree of competition among firms in an industry affects the optimal incentives that firms provide to their managers a central assumption is that there is free entry and exit in the industry which implies that changes in the nature of competition lead to changes in the equilibrium market structure the main result is that as the intensity of product market competition increases as a result of greater product substitutability or greater market size principals unambiguously provide stronger incentives to their agents to reduce costs at the same time more intense competition also leads to more volatile firm level profits consequently managers incentives are positively correlated with firm level risk consistent with empirical evidence a decrease in the cost of entering the market has the opposite effect on incentives but still induces a positive correlation between risk and incentives

an empirical investigation of changes in scale economies for the commercial banking firm 1979 1986 the period of the 1980s represents a particularly turbulent time for the banking industry a number of technological and regulatory changes have occurred including the elimination of regulation q which had limited the explicit interest payments that banks could pay on some types of deposits it would be expected that these changes would affect the structure of costs for banks the behavior of the cost function is studied over the 1979 1986 time period and in contrast to previous studies using earlier data increasing economies of scale are found in the later years for banks in both unit and branch banking states these results indicate that there may be increased cost pressure for smaller banks to become larger either through mergers and acquisitions or through internal growth this may lead to further consolidation pressures within the industry and reductions in the overall number of banking firms copyright 1991 by ohio state university press

efficiency wages and x inefficiencies within most organizations agents may spend time on a variety of tasks productive and redistributive in this paper i derive an optimal multi task incentive scheme under the assumption that agents have limited liability the wage level is shown to increase with an agent s discretion and the organization s profits with multiple agents it is generally not optimal for the principal to fully eliminate distributional conflict within the organization the resulting influence costs constitute a measure of x inefficiency the analysis illuminates the relationship between competition and influence costs emphasizing the role of the organization s production technology

x inefficiency competition and market information whether competition forces firms toward efficient behaviour is an open question we consider a duopoly with firms run by managers and affected by adverse selection on costs in contrast to recent literature we point out that to have a genuine effect on firm x inefficiency competition must change managerial incentives by introducing the availability of some signal on the rivals behaviour we show that if costs are correlated the contractual use of that signal can render private managerial information uninfluential this result stresses the informational role of the market and suggests scope for future work

how do competitive pressures affect incentives to innovate when there is a market for inventions competition and intellectual property ip protections are complements in stimulating innovation when ip is appropriable a market for inventions forms and competitive pressures increase incentives to innovate competition among producers the demand side of the market for inventions and competition among inventors the supply side of the market for inventions create incentives to innovate when ip is not fully appropriable markets for inventions are limited and competitive pressures can decrease incentives to innovate firms vertically integrate r d and production and share technology to appropriate the returns to ip this implies that antitrust policy and ip protections are complements

currency swaps and long term covered interest parity abstract the present study employs daily data as opposed to weekly data used in previous studies to examine whether long term covered interest parity holds when a currency swap is used as a hedging instrument we find that large deviations were not rare during the late 1980s but such deviations have diminished in recent years

correspondent services and cost economies in commercial banking abstract prior bank cost function studies have ignored the fact that some banks obtain a substantial amount of services from their correspondents if these services are paid for with compensating deposit balances their cost to the purchasing bank is not reflected in standard expense reports this paper investigates whether explicit consideration of theese correspondent costs materially affects estimated bank returns to scale the results indicate that the level of banksoperating costs is underreported by as much as 15 while scale economy estimates for unit banks are not significantly affected by the addition of correspondent service costs prior studies have overestimated branch bank scale economies by a small but statistically significant amount

anticompetitive financial contracting the design of financial claims this paper presents the first model where entry deterrence takes place through financial rather than product market channels in standard models of the interaction between product and financial markets a firm s use of financial instruments deters entry by affecting product market behavior whereas in our model entry deterrence occurs by affecting the credit market behavior of investors towards entrant firms we find that in order to deter entry the claims held on incumbent firms should be sufficiently risky i e equity in contrast to the standard branderlewis 1986 result that debt deters entry the model sheds light on the policy debate on the separation of banking as to whether banks should be permitted to hold equity in firms it also provides an explanation for why venture capitalists hold automatically convertible securities in start up firms

market structure and the efficiency of european insurance companies a stochastic frontier analysis abstract this paper is motivated by the progressive liberalisation of the european insurance market in recent years it uses stochastic frontier analysis to estimate flexible fourier cost functions for european insurance companies separate frontiers are estimated for life non life and composite companies we adopt a maximum likelihood approach to estimation in which the variance of both one sided and two sided error terms is modelled jointly with the frontiers this approach allows us to simultaneously control for the impact of heteroskedasticity on the estimation of scale economies as well as estimating the effect of firm size and market structure on x inefficiency the study draws on standard poor s eurothesys data set of financial reports for the period 1995 to 2001 this provides technical and non technical accounts at year end for life non life and composite insurance businesses in 14 major european countries our estimates suggest that over this period most european insurers were operating under conditions of decreasing costs increasing returns to scale and that company size and domestic market share were significant factors determining x inefficiency larger firms and those with high market shares tend to have higher levels of cost inefficiency

an economic analysis of interest rate swaps interest rate swaps a financial innovation in recent years are based upon the principle of comparative advantage an interest rate swap is a useful tool for active liability management and for hedging against interest rate risk the purpose of this paper is to provide a simple economic analysis of interest rate swaps alternative uses of and the appropriate valuation procedure for interest rate swaps are described the significant increase in both the levels and the volatilities of market interest rates since the late 70 s has resulted in substantially higher interest rate risks faced by business firms and financial institutions the problem and consequences of interest rate risk exposure are particularly serious for firms in which the duration of assets does not match the duration of the liabilities for instance most financial institutions and many corporations financed long term fixed rate assets with short term floating rate liabilities such firms lose when the shortterm interest rates in the market rise unexpectedly because for given fixed rates of return on their assets the short term interest costs that they have to pay rise with the market interest rates conversely these firms gain from an unexpected decline in short term market interest rates in recent years the introduction and the development of new financial products in the capital markets such as interest rate futures interest rate options and interest rate swaps represent logical responses to the increased need to reduce firms exposure to interest rate risk

long term covered interest parity evidence from currency swaps abstract this paper constructs long term arbitrage conditions using a now well developed mechanism for hedging long term currency positions the currency swap using the arbitrage conditions bond yields denominated in different currencies are compared across the onshore markets of canada japan germany switzerland the united kingdom and the united states and within the euromarket the evidence indicates that long term financial capital is as mobile across these markets as is short term capital this appears to be the case both within the euromarket and across political jurisdictions

swap covered interest parity in long date capital markets using the currency swap as the forward exchange risk hedge the covered interest parity condition in the long date capital markets is evaluated of interest is the extent to which deviations from parity can be attributed to transactions costs the empirical conclusions presented in the paper suggest that although on average transactions costs account for deviations from parity net deviations in excess of transactions costs are neither rare nor short lived yet an analysis of the variance structure of covered interest parity reveals that these profit opportunities diminish over time and eventually disappear copyright 1996 by mit press

political vs currency premia in international real interest differentials a study of forward rates for 24 countries abstract different approaches to quantifying the degree of capital mobility for a cross section of currencies particularly saving investment correlations and tests of real interest parity have appeared to show a surprisingly low degree of financial integration we use a new data set forward rate data for 24 countries including many small industrialized countries and seven ldcs to decompose the real interest differential into two parts the covered interest differential or political premium and the real forward discount or currency premium the latter in turn can be decomposed into the exchange risk premium and expected real depreciation we find a high degree of capital mobility across political boundaries for most of the g 11 countries plus hong kong and singapore for our sample period of 1982 to 1987 even for most of the other ldcs and smaller industrialized countries for which covered interest parity clearly fails the political premium is not as big a component of the real interest differential as the currency premium france would appear to have higher capital mobility than most by the criterion of real interest differentials but is seen in fact to have low capital mobility by the criterion of covered interest differentials a clear example of the superiority of the latter criterion

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

under pressure how the business environment affects productivity and efficiency of european life insurance companies deregulation and widespread economic changes have fundamentally affected the business environment of european life insurance companies over the last decades we apply multi stage data envelopment analysis to identify the impact of the changing environment on productivity and efficiency of european life insurance companies considering a sample of 970 life insurance companies from 14 european countries we show that general economic capital market and insurance market conditions are important drivers of efficiency although we find no technical change in the european life insurance sector we nonetheless observe an efficiency increase in 2002 2013 that leads to an increase in total factor productivity these trends can be explained by more challenging business conditions in the 2000s our results emphasize the need to control for the business environment in cross country efficiency studies

endogenous firm efficiency in a cournot principal agent model abstract in a market of cournot firms managed by agents the degree of firm efficiency is inversely related o the number of firms in the market journal of economic literature classification numbers l22 d23 d43

the multibank holding company effect on cost efficiency in banking abstract this paper tests the hypothesis that differences in the organizational form embodied in independent banks one bank holding companies and multibank holding companies result in differences in operating cost efficiency the transaction and agency cost paradigms for analysis of organizational efficiency provide theoretical motivation for the hypothesis the effects of organizational form on bank operating expenses for individual banks are evaluated on subsamples divided into quartiles based on total revenue results indicate that for banks having revenues in the lowest quartile both one bank and multibank holding company affiliates are cost efficient relative to independent banks multibank holding company affiliates are cost efficient relative to both one bank affiliates and independent banks for banks in the interquartile range no significant differences in cost efficiency are noted banks in the highest revenue quartile relative efficiency at the organizational level is also evaluated results provide evidence of lower operating costs for banking operations of both multibank and one bank holding company organizations relative to independent banks taken as a whole the results imply that holding company affiliation conveys cost advantages to banking units below the 75th revenue percentile

do managers work harder in competitive industries abstract we analyze the relationship between product market competition and managerial effort in a linear principal agent model firms compete in a differentiated cournot oligopoly we use two competition indexes the degree of product differentiation and the number of firms an increase in competition stemming from a lower degree of product differentiation reduces the optimal level of effort while an increase in competition from more firms has an ambiguous effect an increase in the number of firms reduces increases effort when the degree of product differentiation is low high

market power cost reduction and consumer search abstract this paper reconciles two opposing views in the r d and agency literatures about how market power influences incentives to reduce costs i develop a model where consumers search for prices firms set prices and technology is determined endogenously through stochastic investment to show that the relation between market power and cost reduction depends on the context i show that shifts in different parameters induce market power and investment to vary in different ways this view is supported by the ambiguity of the conclusions of the empirical literature on the determinants of r d and productivity growth

the determinants of firms performance can finance constraints improve technical efficiency this paper analyses the mechanisms through which binding finance constraints can induce debt constrained firms to improve technical efficiency to guarantee positive profits this hypothesis is tested on a sample of firms belonging to the italian manufacturing technical efficiency scores are computed by estimating parametric production frontiers using the one stage approach as in battese and coelli battese g coelli t 1995 a model for technical efficiency effects in a stochastic frontier production function for panel data empirical economics 20 325 332 the results support the hypothesis that a restriction in the availability of financial resources can affect positively efficiency 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

firm competition and incentive pay rent seeking at work empirical evidence shows that competition among firms generates steep incentives inside firms incentive pay stimulates productive investments but may generate inefficient rent seeking investments

branching scale economies and banking costs abstract in this paper we develop and estimate a model of bank costs based on a theory of the branch cost function first we show that convenient branch location is important to banking customers and implies that banks do not necessarily operate branches at minimum average cost this theoretical result provides a rationale for including branch variables in the bank cost function second we estimate a statistical cost equation derived explicitly from assumptions about the branch cost function and including branch output variables our empirical results suggest substantial economies of scale at the branch level but no economies from expansion by branching finally we show that the resulting cost structure of the banking industry does not imply that a highly concentrated banking structure is necessary for efficiency thus economies of scale would not be expected to force small banks out of the market even if current restrictions on interstate banking are liberalized

competition long run contracts and internal inefficiencies in firms abstract internal reward structures in firms are often integral parts of their culture and are changed infrequently in comparison to decisions about e g prices this paper investigates how this feature of firm organization provides a mechanism through which product market competition affects firms internal efficiency the design of firms internal organization is modeled as a choice of an incentive structure between a principal and an agent with strategic implications for firm s competitive positions on the product market it is shown that contrary to popular beliefs there may be a negative relation between the competitiveness of the product market and effort incentives

endogenous market structures and contract theory delegation principal agent contracts screening franchising and tying abstract i study the role of unilateral strategic contracts for firms active in markets with price competition and endogenous entry traditional results change substantially when the market structure is endogenous rather than exogenous they concern 1 contracts of managerial delegation to non profit maximizers 2 incentive principal agent contracts in the presence of moral hazard on cost reducing activities 3 screening contracts in case of asymmetric information on the productivity of the managers 4 vertical contracts of franchising in case of hold up problems and 5 tying contracts by monopolists competing also in secondary markets firms use always these contracts to strengthen price competition and manage to obtain positive profits in spite of free entry

managerial incentives and product market competition are imperfectly competitive leibenstein 1966 claims that there may be a substantial amount of x inefficiency where x inefficiency measures the degree to which actual profits depart from the maximum of profits that could be obtained if all operations in the firm were carried out at minimal costs he offers empirical evidence from case studies showing that the welfare loss due to organizational slack is of an order of magnitude bigger than the welfare loss due to monopolistic price distortions on imperfectly competitive markets these results support the common presumption that increasing competition reduces organizational and in particular managerial slack however this early literature does not offer a theoretical explanation for the link between competition and managerial incentives in particular it ignores the fact that managerial incentives can be affected by the design of an incentive scheme in this paper i derive the optimal incentive scheme for a manager as a function of the competitiveness of the environment in which his firm operates the basic impact of increased competition is that it reduces the profits of a firm this has two effects in the model first if a firm has high costs then the reduction of profits may be sufficient to render the firm unprofitable so the probability that it has to be liquidated goes up this unambiguously induces the manager of the firm to work harder for a cost reduction in order to avoid liquidation and to keep his job second the reduction in profits may affect

when and how us dollar shortages evolved into the full crisis evidence from the cross currency swap market abstract this paper investigates when and how the us dollar shortages evolved into the full crisis in the cross currency swap market between major european currencies and the us dollar during the turmoil of 2007 2009 using the dynamic factor model with regime switching coefficients of each swap price with respect to the latent common factor the 1 year market entered the high crisis regime soon after the onset of the subprime problem in august 2007 the 10 year market entered that regime following the collapse of bear sterns in mid march 2008 financial credit spreads have significant predictive power for switches between high and low regimes

a non parametric analysis of covered interest parity in long date capital markets abstract the financially innovative currency swap has elevated the international mobility of long term assets of interest is whether the covered interest parity condition now holds in these markets with the currency swap as the forward exchange risk hedge the empirical conclusions presented in the paper suggest that deviations from covered interest parity in excess of transactions costs are not rare yet while profit opportunities are not always short lived an analysis of the deviations in excess of transactions costs reveals that they diminish over time and eventually disappear jel f32

privatisation and x inefficiency a bargaining approach the usual analysis of privatization and x inefficiency uses agency theory to model managerial effort the authors model worker effort as determined by a bargain between firms and workers workers dislike effort because it lowers utility firms prefer high effort because it raises productivity public sector firms are assumed to be social welfare maximizers and therefore compared to private sector firms they bargain lower effort levels since they have the interests of consumers and workers at heart the authors model predicts that under certain conditions privatization should raise effort and so lower x inefficiency and that wages may increase or decrease copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

bank acquisition and stockholders wealth abstract bank mergers are a control mechanism for reallocating resources because regulation has a pervasive influence on bank decision making unlike industrial firms bank mergers are subject to regulatory approval bank shareholder returns are analyzed at the time of federal reserve approval of mergers to assess whether regulation reduces differential information between bank managers and outsiders or reduces managers ability to take advantage of differential information empirical tests indicate there are negative returns to acquiring banks for external mergers but normal returns for internal mergers emergency mergers generate positive returns before and upon announcement more negative results occur in states with branching restrictions and in cases when equity financing is used

internationalization and changes in tax policy in oecd countries the importance of domestic veto players this article examines the role that economic and political factors played in tax reform in organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries from 1986 to 1990 some writers argue that economic integration forced states to reform their tax systems the authors findings indicate that economic openness had an indirect effect on the level of change in marginal tax rates the institutional structure of a country was most important countries that had only one veto player or only one institution or party whose approval was necessary for a bill to become law enacted more sweeping reform than states that had more than one veto player these results suggest that even when international or domestic economic factors might dictate a change in policy reform will not be as sweeping in countries in which agreement among several institutions and or parties is necessary

a bargaining model of farrell inefficiency abstract an enormous number of empirical papers have estimated technical efficiency the distance of firms inside a frontier following the model of farrell farrell 1957 the measurement of productive efficiency journal of the royal statistical society series a 120 3 253 290 we propose a theory that explains the distance these empirical papers seek to measure the theory is based on the idea that workers can bargain low effort high crew sizes etc if they and the firm have some monopoly power we provide simple theoretical expressions for the empirical measures of technical and allocative efficiency and compare them to those in the statistical literature we also consider the relation between competition and efficiency

the impact of a public option in the u s health insurance market we develop a game theoretical framework to examine the implications of the introduction of a nonprofit public option in the u s health insurance market in this model heterogeneous consumers have to choose between two competing insurance plans one plan is offered by a profit maximizing private insurer the other by social welfare maximizing public option in equilibrium the distinct objectives of the two insurers induce adverse selection in consumer choice the public option covers the less healthy consumers yielding the more profitable segment of market to the private insurer however our empirical results suggest that both insurers will capture significant parts of the health insurance market jel i11 l10 l21 l32

transactions costs and covered interest arbitrage theory and evidence the extent to which deviations from covered interest parity can be attributed to transactions costs has been exaggerated in the economic literature because the swap market in foreign exchange has been ignored it is shown that such deviations should be no greater than the lowest of the transactions costs in one of three markets the swap market or either of the two relevant securities markets this reconciles the theory with the data which show spreads of no more than a few basis points however the empirical results have no direct bearing on the conventional market efficiency hypothesis

testing for long horizon uip using ppp based exchange rate expectations abstract this paper revisits the uncovered interest parity relation it supplements existing work in two ways it focuses on long instead of short term interest rates and related to that employs exchange rate expectations derived from purchasing power parity ppp instead of actual outcomes among the major floating currencies over the period 1975 1997 the paper cannot support the notion of further increases in uip validation beyond that associated with the wave of financial market liberalization and deregulation in the early 1980s

covered interest parity a high frequency high quality data study profitable deviations from covered interest parity cip represent riskless arbitrage opportunities and so indicate market ineffic iency previous empirical work on cip uses noncontemporaneously sampl ed data and reports mixed results this paper uses high frequency te n minute high quality data gathered personally by the author in th e london foreign exchange market to test the cip condition the resu lts overwhelmingly support the market efficiency hypothesis copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

impact of the information asymmetry between managers and owners under oligopoly we show using a hotelling 1929 model with laffont and tirole 1986 firms that under duopoly the information asymmetry caused by the separation of ownership and control has two effects on owners incentives to induce effort information asymmetry raises the marginal cost of inducing effort which decreases efforts and increases prices since all firms prices increase this leads to a change in the expected demand of each firm and thus in the marginal benefit of inducing effort which may amplify or mitigate the initial impact as a consequence information asymmetry may induce some firms to increase efforts and lower prices more surprisingly it may increase both ex post and ex ante social welfare

product market competition and organizational slack under profit target contracts in a framework a la martin 1993 we introduce a common component in the managers private information in order to address three related questions what is the impact of contracts that reward managers on the basis of realized profits on firms productive and allocative efficiency relative to cost target contracts how do these contracts shape the relationship between competition and organizational slack can we then explain the existing evidence of an inverted u shaped relationship between competition and cost reducing activities as documented in aghion et al aghion p bloom n blundell r griffith r howitt p competition and innovation an inverted u relationship the quarterly journal of economics 120 pp 701 728 2005 we show that profit target contracts introduce a horizontal contractual externality between the competing firms that mitigates organizational slack and improves upon productive efficiency relative to cost plus mechanisms moreover when executive compensations are conditioned on profits an inverted u shaped relationship between product market competition and managerial effort obtains finally we also show that when contractual instruments are endogenous i e when shareholders can choose between profit and cost target rules the equilibrium with profit target contracts always exists and is the only one that survives to standard refinements