governmental behavior in representative democracy a synthesis of the theoretical literature what is the impact of bureaucratic behaviors on tax rates what is preferable a bureaucrat or a partisan politician does a flypaper effect occur when lobby groups influence public policies this article tries to answer these questions by analyzing and comparing six different models of public choice 1 the median voter model 2 the leviathan model 3 the slack maximizing model 4 a general model of bureaucracy 5 the partisan politicians model and 6 a general model of lobbying among several results it is shown that the median voter s income and tax share almost always play a significant role in the design of the public good tax package even if the government does not explicitly try to maximize the median voter s utility the article also provides a synthesis of the positive analysis of the flypaper effect

has regulatory reform had any impact on bank efficiency in indonesia a two stage analysis abstractmore than a decade following the severe economic crisis 1997 indonesia has undergone major regulatory changes in its banking industry this article examines the impact of these regulatory changes on the relative technical efficiency te of the indonesian banking industry employing data envelopment analysis dea and censored tobit regression model additionally the bootstrap approach of simar and wilson is employed to provide statistical properties to the dea efficiency score the findings show that the industry on average is inefficient over the period of analysis also state owned and foreign owned banks are found to be more efficient than any other group of banks finally the impact of regulatory reforms is generally positive and statistically significant

stock markets banks and growth panel evidence this paper investigates the impact of stock markets and banks on economic growth using a panel data set for the period 1976 98 and applying recent gmm techniques developed for dynamic panels on balance we find that stock markets and banks positively influence economic growth and these findings are not due to potential biases induced by simultaneity omitted variables or unobserved country specific effects

a heterogeneous conditional logit model of choice aggregate forecasts using mcfadden s conditional logit model of discrete choice harbor the unrealistic implicit assumption of a random utility distribution that is homogeneous across both alternatives and individuals this article relaxes that assumption a choice model is developed that describes the random utility component as a probability mixture model some numerical results illustrate that the derived model is not constrained by the independence of irrelevant alternatives property an experimental test of visual perceptions demonstrates the potential superiority of the model

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

promoting the sustainability of development institutions a framework for strategy abstract this article presents a generic framework for understanding institutional sustainability in development its lessons draw from the agriculture and health sectors the framework treats institutions as a systems that function in relationship to their environments b organized and managed entities whose organizational structures and procedures must match the tasks products people resources and contexts they deal with and c settings intimately concerned with the exchange of resources where economic and political relationships intertwine to create varying patterns of power and incentive application of the analytic framework has shown that institutional sustainability depends upon maintaining responsive output flows high quality and valued goods and services cost effective goods and services delivery mechanisms organization and management and resource flows recurrent costs capital investments human resources

nontraditional activities and the efficiency of us commercial banks abstract in recent years an increasing portion of bank income has been generated through nontraditional activities most studies of bank efficiency do not include any measure of nontraditional activities when measuring outputs in this paper cost revenue and profit efficiency are estimated by using models with and without nontraditional output the results suggest that the standard model which omits nontraditional output understates bank efficiency evidence also surfaces that based on efficiency the relative ranking of individual banks changes when nontraditional activities are included as a type of output

analysing the determinants of performance of best and worst european banks a mixed logit approach abstract using a dataset of 7635 observations on 1384 commercial banks operating in the eu between 1993 and 2001 we utilise a mixed logit model to identify factors that explain the probability of a bank being a best worst performer the empirical evidence confirms the importance of country level characteristics location and legal tradition and firm level features bank ownership balance sheet structure and size specifically smaller sized banks with higher loan intensity and foreign banks from countries upholding common law traditions have a higher probability of best performance

profit efficiency for spanish savings banks abstract frontier profit efficiency is examined for spanish savings banks over 1986 1991 a period in which the spanish banking has seen considerable deregulation in spain the standard assumption that firms operate in a perfectly competitive output market is unlikely to be met thus we use an alternative profit function specification which allows for market power in the output market profit efficiency is determined using the thick frontier approach and estimated using both alternative and standard profit function specifications to illustrate the effect of different assumptions regarding the competitiveness of the output market estimation of the alternative profit function suggests that the profit inefficiency of spanish savings banks which averaged 28 fell by forty percent between 1986 to 1991 the standard profit function which we believe yields less reliable results generated greater average inefficiency there was no significant shift up or down in the profit frontier itself

laffer paradox leviathan and political contest this paper considers a political contest model wherein self interested politicians seek rents from the public budget while general voters make political efforts to protest against politicians rent seeking directly for example through voting in referendums such as the passage of proposition 13 or indirectly for example through donating money to organized groups such as the national taxpayer union we show that the political contest may ironically lead to the laffer paradox that is rent seeking politicians may intend to set the tax rate higher than the revenue maximizing rate for taming leviathans political protests may not be as effective as competition among governments

x efficiency in banking looking beyond the balance sheet the distribution free and stochastic frontier estimation methods are used to derive bank specific measures of cost and profit xefficiency this is done to investigate the importance of including aggregate measures of off balance sheet obs activities the results indicate that economic cost and production cost x efficiency estimates increase with the inclusion of the obs measure profit xefficiency estimates are largely unaffected further the composition of bankso obs activities appears to help explain interbank differences in cost and profit x efficiency estimates whereas bank size and the mix between on and off balance sheet banking activities are largely uncorrelated with the x efficiency estimates

the sustainability of development projects an impact assessment of german vocational training projects in latin america abstract this article examines the sustainability of 15 vocational training projects in latin america it represents the only ex post facto study of german technical development cooperation to date the theoretical conception of the study is based upon a life course model a systems approach from organization theory and a diffusion model in the investigation a multimethod approach is combined with a procedure that is comparative in several regards its findings show that in many cases german assistance succeeded in helping to increase the organizational effectiveness of the on site implementing agency in a sustainable manner the diffusion effects of such interventions remained in contrast rather modest here it turns out to be decisive which variables are affected by project interventions in conclusion the study s findings serve as the basis for making recommendations for the planning and implementation of development projects

property rights in a fishery regulatory change and firm performance a new method is introduced and applied to the british columbia halibut fishery to analyze changes in productivity of firms harvesting a natural capital stock the index number technique decomposes the contributions of output prices variable input prices fixed inputs and productivity to firm profits adjusted for changes in the natural capital stock an application of the method is given using micro level data from a common pool resource the indexes provide a ready made comparison of all firms to the most profitable firm per unit of resource stock benchmarking with the decompositions also allows firms and regulators to improve overall industry performance by allowing them to analyze what components are contributing most to relative economic profits

investigating heterogeneity in brand preferences in logit models for panel data in analyzing panel data the issue of heterogeneity across households is an important consideration if heterogeneity is present but is ignored in the analysis it will result in biased and inconsi

a random coefficients logit brand choice model applied to panel data a random coefficients logit model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity in brand preferences and in the responses to marketing variables is empirically investigated using household level panel data the unknown underlying distribution of unobserved heterogeneity is approximated by a discrete distribution the results reveal that there is significant unobserved heterogeneity across households and that ignoring its effects results in a downward bias in the parameter estimates of the marketing variables it is therefore important to account for heterogeneity in both preferences and responses in the absence of any a priori knowledge about the nature of heterogeneity across households

financial distress drivers in brazilian banks a dynamic slacks approach abstract this study applies the dynamic slacks based model dsbm developed by tone and tsutsui 2010 in order to assess the evolution of input saving output increasing potentials in major brazilian banks from 1996 to 2011 we propose that these potentials or slacks can be used as proxies for an eventual financial distress situation in the future the main research objective is to determine whether or not different characteristics of bank type related to ownership size and merger and acquisition processes are significantly related to inefficiency levels and by extension to an eventual financial distress situation since higher inefficiency levels also imply lower input saving output decreasing potentials based on a balanced panel model secondary data from economatica were collected and analyzed results indicate higher inefficiency levels and slacks in small public and national banks policy implications are also addressed

does tax competition really promote growth abstract this paper considers the relationship between tax competition and growth in an endogenous growth model where there are stochastic shocks to productivity and capital taxes fund a public good which may be for final consumption or an infrastructure input absent stochastic shocks decentralized tax setting two or more jurisdictions maximizes the rate of growth as the constant returns to scale present with endogenous growth implies extreme tax competition stochastic shocks imply that households face a portfolio choice problem which dampens down tax competition and may raise taxes above the centralized level growth can be lower with decentralization our results also predict a negative relationship between output volatility and growth with decentralization

the emergence of local capacity lessons from colombia abstract the paper analyzes the process of capacity development in a sample of colombian local governments which resulted from a strategy of state decentralization initiated in the mid 1980s the central message of the study is that competition for political office opened the door to responsible and innovative leadership that in turn became the driving force behind capacity building efforts more widespread community participation expanded the range of possibilities open to local governments and provided the basis to sustain capacity over time the experience of these municipios suggests that capacity can be enhanced through skillful innovations even under difficult circumstances

interaction between federal taxation and horizontal tax competition theory and evidence from canada the aim of this paper is to determine to what extent and how federal taxes affect local tax decisions testing the impact of an increase in the federal tax on horizontal tax competition with canada us data for 1984 1994 it finds evidence that an increase in federal tax makes horizontal tax reactions weaker this is because an increase in federal tax raises the cost in terms of utility of income of a unit increase in the province s tax rate on the methodological side it is possible to estimate the impact of the federal tax on the fiscal policy of the province without neglecting control for year effects which cannot be used in the empirical literature because they are perfectly collinear with the federal tax

taste variation in discrete choice models this paper develops an extension of the classical multinomial logit model which approximates a class of models obtained when there is uncontrolled taste variation across agents and choices in addition to the stochastic noise inherent in the logit model unlike semiparametric and parametric alternatives the extended logit model is easy to estimate even when there are many potential choices unlike parametric alternatives it does not require the specification of a distribution of varying tastes the extended logit model can give a quick indication of the impact of taste variation on estimates and it generates estimates of the covariances of the taste shifters it can be used as an exploratory device en route to the construction of a model incorporating a particular form of random taste variation and it can be used to determine whether such effort is required at all when the amount of taste variation is not excessive the approximate model can be adequate itself the model nests the conventional logit model which leads to a misspecification diagnostic a method for estimating the model using conventional logit model software is proposed asymptotic properties of estimators are derived and an application is presented

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

managers and efficiency in banking abstract this paper presents evidence on the impact of managers on cost efficiency in banking stochastic frontier analysis is applied to a unique finnish data set manager age and education have strong yet complicated effects on efficiency the impact of age on efficiency depends on education a university degree is useful mainly in the largest banks of the sample educational background seems to be less important for young managers than for mature ones managing director changes are systematically followed by efficiency changes retirement typically causes an efficiency improvement whereas other manager changes can either improve or weaken efficiency however in many cases mature managers outperform their young colleagues

tax competition and leviathan abstract attitudes towards downward pressure on tax rates from international tax competition depend on attitudes towards government this paper synthesises the two extremes which as in other areas of public finance have dominated the debate typically being presented as stark alternatives the view of government as a leviathan from which tax competition emerges as a useful constraint on policy makers and the view of government as a benevolent maximiser of their citizens welfare from which it emerges as a source of inefficiency conditions are derived under which when policy makers are neither entirely benevolent nor wholly self serving tax coordination benefits the representative citizen

banking reforms performance and risk in china we investigate the impact of the banking reform started from 2005 on ownership structures in china on commercial banks profitability efficiency and risk over the period 2000 2012 providing comprehensive evidence on the impact of banking reform in china we find that banks on average tend to have higher profitability lower risk and lower efficiency after the reforms and the results are robust with our difference in difference approach our results also show that the big 5 state owned banks socb underperform banks with other types of ownership when risk is measured by non performing loans npls over the entire study period but tend to have fewer npls than other banks during the post reform period our results provide some supporting evidence on the ongoing banking reforms in china suggesting that attracting strategic foreign investors and listing socbs on stock exchanges appear to be effective ways to help socbs deal with the problem of npls and manage their risk

structural change power politics and community organizations in africa challenging the patterns puzzles and paradoxes abstract this paper explores two phenomena shaping processes of local institutional and organizational change in rural africa the first is the complexity of institutional layering and dissonance in which local organizations and institutions in rural africa coexist the second is the paradox often found in state local relations in africa central governments encourage local communities to take on responsibilities which the center cannot manage should significant organizational strength emerge at the local level however central powers often move expeditiously to destroy it illustrative material comes primarily from kenya and zimbabwe and selectively from several other countries we ask what new structures are emerging and what old ones are being adapted to new functions we argue that local organizations are critical for addressing ecological decline and restoring the productivity and sustainability of rural africa both localities and national governments have much to gain if the capacities of local organizations can become themselves a valued resource in the resource scarce setting comprising much of rural africa

enjoying the quiet life under deregulation evidence from adjusted lerner indices for u s banks abstract the quiet life hypothesis posits that firms with market power incur inefficiencies rather than reap monopolistic rents we propose a simple adjustment to lerner indices to account for the possibility of forgone rents to test this hypothesis for a large sample of u s commercial banks we find that adjusted lerner indices are significantly larger than conventional lerner indices and trending upward over time instrumental variable regressions reject the quiet life hypothesis for cost inefficiencies however lerner indices adjusted for profit inefficiencies reveal a quiet life among u s banks

the luenberger indicator and productivity growth a note on the european savings banks sector we employ the luenberger productivity indicator to estimate productivity growth and its decomposition into technical change and efficiency change components for savings banks sectors in 10 eu countries between 1996 and 2003 the luenberger indicator requires less restrictive assumptions than standard nonparametric productivity indexes and it allows the assumption of profit maximization to be made for sample firms we estimate average productivity growth in the savings banks sector to be 2 78 per annum and driven almost entirely by technical change whilst the general results confirm earlier findings this study is one of the earliest to identify cross border differences in productivity growth in the savings banks sector

measuring efficiency at u s banks accounting for heterogeneity is important abstract estimates of bank cost efficiency can be biased if bank heterogeneity is ignored i compare x inefficiency derived from a model constraining the cost frontier to be the same for all banks in the u s and a model allowing for different frontiers and error terms across federal reserve districts i find that the data reject the single cost function model x inefficiency measures based on the single cost function model are on average higher than those based on the separate cost functions model the distributions of the one sided error terms are wider for the single cost function model than for the separate cost functions model and the ranking of districts by the level of x inefficiency differs in the two models the results suggest it is important when studying x inefficiency to account for differences across the markets in which banks are operating and that since x inefficiency is by construction a residual it will be particulary sensitive to omissions in the basic model

banks responses to deregulation profits technology and efficiency the deregulation of interest rates in the early 1980s raised bank funding costs and lowered profits in response banks raised fees for deposit services reduced branch operating costs and shifted to higher earning assets rates of return did not regain their prederegulation levels until the early 1990s our goal is to decompose the change in bank profits following deregulation into i intemal bank initiated adjustments to the new regulatory structure and ii external contemporaneous changes in banks business environment this decomposition will depend in part on the assumed competitive structure of the banking industry with perfect competition output and input prices are part of the external environment and banks responses are limited to changes in output and input quantities an alternative approach assumes imperfect competition where banks have some control over output prices deposit fees minimum balance requirements and interest rates on certain loans and output quantities and input prices comprise the external environment the altemative model is supported by the data using this model large banks but not smaller banks are found to have relied primarily on changing output prices and input use to mitigate and reverse the negative effects of deregulation on profits the adjustment to deregulation was essentially complete after four years following this additional changes in bank profitability during the late 1980s were primarily due to changes in banks business environment

modeling multiple sources of heterogeneity in multinomial logit models methodological and managerial issues we offer a framework to specify and estimate various sources of heterogeneity in multinomial logit brand choice models we let each brand specific intercept and each parameter of the explanatory variable vector vary randomly across households in addition we distinguish loyal households from the rest our results suggest that incorporating multiple sources of heterogeneity improves the model fit and suggests higher impact of marketing mix elements on brand choice we highlight the importance of incorporating multiple sources of heterogeneity the model we implement yields valuable managerial insights

do consumers pay for one stop banking evidence from an alternative revenue function abstract in providing financial services jointly banks may reduce costs due to complementarities in production cost economies of scope or raise revenues from complementarities in consumption revenue economies of scope cost economies of scope between bank deposits and loans have been found to be small revenue economies of scope are investigated here for the first time and found to be insignificant over 1978 1990 for both small and large banks and for those on or off the revenue efficient frontier the lack of complementarities between deposits and loans where benefits are most likely to occur suggests that claims of important synergies from an expansion of banking powers be taken with caution

economic value competition and financial distress in the european banking system abstract in this paper we examine the impact of a large number of factors at the bank level liquidity and credit risks asset size income diversification and market power at the industry level banking concentration and macro level real gdp growth on bank financial distress using an unbalanced panel of 308 european commercial banks between 1996 and 2009 the observations falling below a given threshold of the empirical distribution of the shareholder value ratio proxy bank financial distress we employ a panel probit regression and given the presence of overlapping data giving rise to residual autocorrelation we use the bertschek and lechner 1998 robust estimator of the covariance matrix of parameters we show that credit risk liquidity risk and bank market power are the most influential determinants of distressed shareholder value ratio finally we evaluate the model out sample forecasting performance over the 2008 2009 crisis period

endogenous bank risk and efficiency we develop a framework to incorporate bank risk as measured from the variance of profits or returns within a model of frontier efficiency our framework follows the premise that risk is endogenously related to efficiency we estimate our model using panel data for u s banks and bayesian techniques we show that excluding risk from the efficiency model significantly biases the efficiency estimates and the ranking of banks according to their competitive advantage we also demonstrate that there is a negative risk efficiency nexus with causality running both ways while our estimates of risk are fully consistent with the developments in the banking industry over the period 1976 2014

tragedy of the fiscal common fiscal stock externalities in a leviathan model of federalism the paper deals with vertical tax competition between self interested governments in a dynamic environment in a federation competition between the federal and the state governments arises when tax sources are not separated but pooled since dynamic inefficiencies will be stressed the focus is on fiscal stock externalities rather than on flow externalities the paper shows that the leviathans in a federation tax the fiscal common resource more extensively than the single leviathan in a unitary state furthermore the positive impact of political stability on public consumption of the fiscal common will be discussed

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

effects of heterogeneity on bank efficiency scores bank efficiency estimates often serve as a proxy of managerial skill since they quantify sub optimal production choices but such deviations can also be due to omitted systematic differences among banks in this study we examine the effects of heterogeneity on bank efficiency scores we compare different specifications of a stochastic cost and alternative profit frontier model with a baseline specification after conducting a specification test we discuss heterogeneity effects on efficiency levels ranks and the tails of the efficiency distribution we find that heterogeneity controls influence both banks optimal costs and profits and their ability to be efficient differences in efficiency scores are important for more than only methodological reasons first different ways of accounting for heterogeneity result in estimates of foregone profits and additional costs that are significantly different from what we infer from our general specification second banks are significantly re ranked when their efficiency is estimated with a specification other than the preferred general specification third the general specification gives the most reliable estimates of the probability of distress although differences to the other specifications are low

how did bank holding companies prosper in the 1990s abstract this paper examines the improved performance of us bank holding companies bhcs from 1991 to 1997 analysis of cost and profit functions using several alternative output specifications suggests that the gains were primarily due to productivity growth and changes in scale economies various econometric methodologies yield productivity growth of about 0 4 per year and the optimal size seems to have increased in the 1990s era of deregulation technological change and financial innovation estimates of both productivity growth and economies of scale are robust across traditional and non traditional output specifications despite the overall success however substantial cost and profit inefficiency existed for bhcs of all sizes in the 1990s these efficiency estimates are particularly sensitive to the output specification and failure to account for non traditional activities like off balance sheet obs items leads profit efficiency but not cost efficiency to be understated for the largest bhcs

mergers and technical efficiency in spanish savings banks a stochastic distance function approach abstract the aim of this paper is to test the temporal variation of technical efficiency of spanish savings banks during the period 1985 1998 furthermore we test whether merged and non merged firms have different levels and temporal patterns of technical efficiency a stochastic output distance function r w shephard theory of cost and production functions princeton university press princeton nj is employed to accommodate multiple output technology the distance function provides the advantage that it does not need information about prices so it can accommodate the multi product nature of the financial sector only using the quantities as data an important point when the assumptions about perfectly competitive markets are unlikely to be met the temporal variation of efficiency is modeled extending the battese and coelli journal of productivity analysis 3 1992 153 169 approach in two ways relaxing the monotonicity of the temporal variation pattern of the efficiency term and allowing for different patterns of efficiency change between merged and non merged firms

the risk of financial intermediaries this paper reconsiders the formal estimation of bank risk using the variability of the profit function in our model point estimates of the variability of profits are derived from a model where this variability is endogenous to other bank characteristics such as capital and liquidity we estimate the new model on the entire panel of us banks spanning the period 1985q1 2012q4 the findings show that bank risk was fairly stable up to 2001 and accelerated quickly thereafter up to 2007 we also establish that the risk of the relatively large banks and banks that failed in the subprime crisis is higher than the industry s average thus we provide a new leading indicator which is able to forecast future solvency problems of banks

the competitive role of credit unions in small local financial services markets although there is a considerable literature on the role of market structure in banking markets no attention has been given to the impact of the competitive discipline provided by credit unions on consumer credit rates offered by banks after presenting a theoretical framework for understanding the impact credit unions should be expected to have this article analyzes a pooled cross sectional time series sample with roughly 1 000 observations on relatively small united states markets with the focus on explaining bank rates for two types of consumer loans results confirm the previously observed role of market structure and suggest a significant role for credit unions in disciplining the exercise of market power by banks

the medium term aftermarket in high tech ipos patterns and implications abstract a number of theoretical models loosely characterized under the rubric of behavioral finance suggest that price convergence to value is far from instantaneous and possibly involves interplay between noise and informed traders these models are motivated by documented anomalous patterns in equity markets and assume some form of psychological bias that affects investor behavior with the benefit of hindsight it seems clear that the technology sector went through a bubble like pattern in the late 1990s and that investor biases if indeed they exist and can be inferred may have been even more pronounced accordingly our study focuses on the medium term aftermarket in high tech us ipos during this period using both ordered logit regression and split population hazard modeling approaches we document momentum and reversal patterns that are consistent with the predictions of some behavioral finance models our findings indicate that momentum variables are important while fundamental variables have at best weak explanatory power

exploring the nexus between banking sector reform and performance evidence from newly acceded eu countries abstract the aim of this study is to examine the relationship between banking sector reform and bank performance measured in terms of efficiency total factor productivity growth and net interest margin accounting for the effects through competition and bank risk taking to this end we develop an empirical model of bank performance which is consistently estimated using recent econometric techniques the model is applied to bank panel data from ten newly acceded eu countries the results indicate that both banking sector reform and competition exert a positive impact on bank efficiency while the effect of reform on total factor productivity growth is significant only toward the end of the reform process finally the effect of capital and credit risk on bank performance is in most cases negative while it seems that higher liquid assets reduce the efficiency and productivity of banks

accountability and decentralisation in government an incomplete contracts model this paper approaches the question of the appropriate level of decentralisation of power in government as a problem in the allocation of control rights under incomplete contracts the model of the paper compares allocations of power to local central and regional government as alternative means of motivating governments to act in the interests of citizens centralisation allows benefits from policy coordination but has costs in terms of diminished accountability which can be precisely defined as the reduced probability that the welfare of a given region can determine the re election of the government the model is extended to allow for conflicts of interest within regions and externalities between central and local governments in a federation it is also applied to determining levels of fiscal transfer between localities and to circumstances where governments may act as leviathans appropriating resources for their own use

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

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

a note on savings and loan ownership structure and expense preference a re examination this study extends the work of akella and greenbaum journal of banking finance 12 1988 419 through the use of a much larger nationwide sample of us saving and loan associations and supports their original finding of significant expense preference behavior in mutual savings and loans during their original study period 1979 80 this study also provides evidence that over the time period of substantial deregulation and changes in the competitive environment in the us financial services industry expense preference behavior for savings and loans decreased the results are consistent with the idea that the removal of barriers that restrict competition should improve managerial efficiency in firms that survive 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the determinants of bank rates in local consumer lending markets comparing market and institution level results 1 introductionwith the exception of a few very recent studies the sizeable literature on the impact of market structure in banking markets1 has ignored the potential competitive role played by credit unions this is surprising since the continuing consolidation of the financial services industry in recent years has naturally raised concerns about competitive effects and credit unions would seem to be a likely source of market discipline 2 this paper explores these issues using both market and firm data using a variety of approaches economists have started paying some attention to the interaction between banks and credit unions emmons and schmid 2000 using county level data examine twoway intertemporal linkages between credit union participation rates and market concentration of the commercial banking sector to support the view that the two types of institutions compete in the market for consumer deposits similarly feinberg and rahman 2001 find that credit union and bank rates for two consumer loan products can each be shown to be influenced by the other tokle and tokle 2000 found a competitive influence of credit unions on bank certificate of deposit cd rates offered in idaho and montana while feinberg 2001 explored their impact on consumer loan rates in a broader sample of relatively small local markets3 over the 1992 1997 period the latter article found that both unsecured and new vehicle loan rates offered by banks in these markets were affected in a significant manner by the market share held by the two leading banks implying a competitive role for smaller financial institutions generally and for new vehicle loan rates alone by the share of credit unions in those markets whether these results would generalize to larger metropolitan areas is unclear and is the topic of what follows i focus on the same two loan products 24 month unsecured non credit card loans and 48 month new vehicle loans both of which seem likely to be provided in a local market and empirically explain the determinants of bank loan rates in a sample of 56 markets both large and small for the period 1992 1998 an innovative aspect of this paper is that i analyze both market level data and institution level data for 81 banks in those 56 markets and consider as well the role of multimarket linkages affecting these banks 2 theoretical frameworkvirtually all models of imperfect competition imply that increasing entry and supply from fringe suppliers will lower prices this clearly suggests that an increasing credit union presence should discipline prices in local financial services markets to formalize i employ a modified version of the dominant firm price leadership model the modification involves the notion that while credit unions may generally be thought of as fringe suppliers not all banks and savings and loans sl ii as cu increases the li declines iii as epsilon sub cu increases the li declines and not quite as obvious but easy to derive iv the declines in ii and iii are larger in absolute value as cr2 is larger

why research partnerships really matter innovation theory institutional arrangements and implications for developing new technology for the poor abstract this paper explores the conceptual basis for existing and emergent institutional patterns in the context of partnership approaches to technology development drawing examples from recent studies of private enterprise activity in india smallholder horticulture it suggests that agricultural innovation as a process involves a wider range of organizational types than the conventional policy focus on public sector research organizations would tend to suggest it uses the concept of a national innovation system to argue that a partnership approach is adopted as a core methodology for engaging science and technology development with the livelihood demands of the poor

culture openness and finance abstract differences in culture proxied by differences in religion and language cannot be ignored when examining why investor protection differs across countries we show that a country s principal religion predicts the cross sectional variation in creditor rights better than a country s natural openness to international trade its language its income per capita or the origin of its legal system catholic countries protect the rights of creditors less well than protestant countries a country s natural openness to international trade mitigates the influence of religion on creditor rights culture proxies are also helpful in understanding how investor rights are enforced across countries

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

financial deregulation and total factor productivity change an empirical study of turkish commercial banks abstract in january 1980 a new liberal economic policy was adopted in turkey to promote financial market development and increase the efficiency and productivity of the financial sector by fostering competition among banks as a result of this policy the turkish banking system witnessed a series of legal structural and institutional changes throughout the 1980s to enhance their competitive viability turkish banks responded by streamlining their operations and investing in new technology utilizing a dea type malmquist total factor productivity change index we examine productivity growth efficiency change and technical progress in turkish commercial banks during the deregulation of financial markets in turkey we found that all forms of turkish banks although in different magnitudes have recorded significant productivity gains driven mostly by efficiency increases rather than technical progress efficiency increases however were mostly owing to improved resource management practices rather than improved scales our results also indicate that private banks began to close their performance gap with public banks in the new environment

shareholder value creation in japanese banking this paper advances the study of fiordelisi and molyneux 2010 by examining the shareholder value efficiency and its determinants for a large sample of japanese banks between 1999 and 2011 a new specifically tailored measure of the economic value added approach based on the shadow price of equity is developed in order to account for specific characteristics of the japanese banking system this new shareholder value measure is then used in a dynamic panel data model as a linear function of various bank risk bank specific and macroeconomic variables this study finds that cost efficiency gains credit risk and bank size are the most important factors in explaining the shareholder value creation in japanese banking cost efficiency changes are also found to significantly influence cost of equity capital

ownership structure institutional organization and measured x efficiency efficiency measurement has become a very popular field in applied economics in recent years and with this interest there has been a large intellectual investment in refining the empirical methods available to researchers in the area in this paper we relate these developments to harvey leibenstein s original 1966 insight into the psychological ideas underlying the notion that economic agents may not achieve maximal efficiency in their productive decisions and behavior of course it is always possible to argue that apparent inefficiency only arises from a failure of the observer to realize what it is that is being maximized however we shall evade this easy escape route into nonfalsifiable hypothesizing and instead shall take at face value the fact that too many empirical studies have come up with substantial measures of inefficiency for us to ignore its importance for normative economics

sustainable development differing perspectives of ecologists and economists and relevance to ldcs abstract the claim is now widely that it is desirable to aim for a sustainable society for sustainable economic development and for sustainable productive systems this reflects the outlook of ecologists rather than the majority of economists although a small group of economists does see particular virtue in sustainability the outlook of ecologists is illustrated by conway s criteria for assessing the desirability of agricultural systems this approach is shown to involve several unresolved conceptual issues this leads to a discussion of the policy of a safe minimum standard as proposed by some economists and the critique of expected utility and risk benefit analysis by page and maclean and whether this might provide a bridge between the views of economists and ecologists a basis is established for considering whether sustainability of productive systems is likely to be a more important goal in less developed countries than in developed countries further examples of the stress of ecologists on the production sustainability goal are given and additional policy prescriptions for instance involving nomadism and transhumance are discussed