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

group loyalty and the taste for redistribution interpersonal preferences preferences that depend on the characteristics of others are typically hard to infer from observable individual behavior as an alternative approach this paper uses survey data to investigate interpersonal preferences i show that self reported attitudes toward welfare spending are determined not only by financial self interest but also by interpersonal preferences these interpersonal preferences are characterized by a negative exposure effect individuals decrease their support for welfare as the welfare recipiency rate in their community rises and racial group loyalty individuals increase their support for welfare spending as the share of local recipients from their own racial group rises these findings help to explain why levels of welfare benefits are relatively low in racially heterogeneous states

determinants of banks nerlovian economic efficiency a dea bootstrap approach this study aims to evaluate the nerlovian economic efficiency of taiwanese commercial banks and its determinants by assuming the presence of an imperfectly competitive market using a two stage esti

a stochastic dea study of hotel efficiency this current study is the first to apply stochastic data envelopment analysis sdea approach to assess the efficiency of hotels the determinants of hotel efficiency were also investigated employing the tobit regression model approach the sdea results show that the sdea efficiency measures are higher than the deterministic ones and the greater the stochastic variability of outputs the closer the envelope moves successively to any given observation and the efficiency score approaches one the optimal solution to sdea involves the presence of some buffer slack of all outputs in applications involving practice production situation such buffer slack can be interpreted as the firms need to hold inventory excess capacity and organizational slack against stochastic uncertainty of market environment our results also indicate that resort hotels achieve better efficiency than those in metropolitan areas and operating as part of a chain is not the main determinant of the efficiency of international touri

bias and precision in the dea two stage method in data envelopment analysis dea the two stage method is a popular procedure for accounting for exogenous influences on efficiency with the conventional two stage method a dea is first conducted using only traditional endogenous inputs and outputs then the first stage dea scores are regressed on the environmental contextual exogenous inputs of interest the regression outcomes are used to identify exogenous inputs that influence the first stage dea scores to a statistically significant degree and to adjust dea scores to account for these influences herein it is demonstrated empirically that the conventional method exhibits substantial bias and low precision with the degree of bias and precision affected by input variance and correlation a reverse two stage procedure that yields estimates without the bias and precision problems that compromise the validity of the conventional method s estimates is suggested

efficiency and risk in taiwan banking sbm super dea estimation in this study we adopt the two data envelopment analysis dea methods including banker charnes cooper bcc and slacks based measure sbm super efficiency to investigate whether a bank s technical efficiency index s results incorporating account risk and not incorporating account risk differ significantly the information is obtained from 43 taiwanese banks for the period 1998 to 2002 we also employ the nonradial and slacks based malmquist total factor productivity tfp index to measure the impact of productivity change on the panel data our empirical results from the dea approach are summarized as follows 1 loan quality factors have an impact on a bank s efficiency in general the bank with a higher degree of problem loans drops down its efficiency by incorporating account risk however the bank with a lower degree of problem loans increases its efficiency by incorporating account risk 2 super efficiency provides a good framework for ranking efficient units 3 based on the nonradial an

a study of bank efficiency taking into account risk preferences abstract i use the stochastic cost frontier approach to investigate efficiency of banks operating in the third federal reserve district accounting for the quality and riskiness of bank output in addition to the mean and mode of the conditional distribution of the one sided error term i calculate confidence intervals for the inefficiency measures based on the conditional distribution the results indicate that third district banks are operating at cost efficient output levels and product mixes but are not efficiently using their inputs the second part of the article relates the inefficiency measures to several correlates

good bye lenin or not the effect of communism on people s preferences preferences for redistribution as well as the generosities of welfare states differ significantly across countries in this paper we test whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on individual preferences we exploit the experiment of german separation and reunification to establish exogeneity of the economic system from 1945 to 1990 east germans lived under a communist regime with heavy state intervention and extensive redistribution we find that after german reunification east germans are more in favor of redistribution and state intervention than west germans even after controlling for economic incentives this effect is especially strong for older cohorts who lived under communism for a longer time period we further find that east germans preferences converge towards those of west germans we calculate that it will take one to two generations for preferences to converge completely

information or regulation what drives the international activities of commercial banks information costs and regulatory barriers distinguish international financial markets from national ones using panel data on bilateral assets and liabilities of commercial banks i empirically determine the impact of information costs and regulations and i isolate intra eu financial linkages i confirm that information costs and regulations are important factors influencing international asset choices of banks but their relative importance differs among countries

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

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

decentralization of governance and development all around the world in matters of governance decentralization is the rage even apart from the widely debated issues of subsidiarity and devolution in the european union and states rights in the united states decentralization has been at the center stage of policy experiments in the last two decades in a large number of developing and transition economies in latin america africa and asia the world bank for example has embraced it as one of the major governance reforms on its agenda for example world bank 2000 burki perry and dillinger 1999 take also the examples of the two largest countries of the world china and india decentralization has been regarded as the major institutional framework for the phenomenal industrial growth in the last two decades in china taking place largely in the nonstate nonprivate sector india ushered in a landmark constitutional reform in favor of decentralization around the same time it launched a major program of economic reform in the early 1990s on account of its many failures the centralized state everywhere has lost a great deal of legitimacy and decentralization is widely believed to promise a range of benee ts it is often suggested as a way of reducing the role of the state in general by fragmenting central authority and introducing more intergovernmental competition and checks and balances it is viewed as a way to make government more responsive and efe cient technological changes have also made it somewhat easier than before to provide public services like electricity and water supply relatively efe ciently in smaller market areas and the lower levels of government have now a greater ability to handle certain tasks in a world of rampant ethnic cone icts and separatist movements decentralization is also regarded as a way of diffusing social and political tensions and ensuring local cultural and political autonomy these potential benee ts of decentralization have attracted a very diverse range

why european banks are less profitable than u s banks a decomposition approach abstract the low profitability of european banks relative to their u s counterparts has recently raised concerns among policy makers and researchers this paper attempts to shed light on this issue by using the o donnell 2012 decomposition approach this approach enables us to decompose the relative profitability of european banks into an output input price index and a total factor productivity index with the former further decomposed into two price indexes and the latter further into four productivity and efficiency measures our results show that european banks profitability was not only weak but also deteriorated over time our further analysis shows that the decline in the output input price index was due to declines in relative lending rate and relative return on securities and an increase in funding costs while the decline in the productivity index was driven by declines in technical efficiency scale efficiency and residual mix efficiency

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

social mobility and the demand for redistribution the poum hypothesis this paper examines the often stated idea that the poor do not support high levels of redistribution because of the hope that they or their offspring may make it up the income ladder this prospect of upward mobility poum hypothesis is shown to be fully compatible with rational expectations and fundamentally linked to concavity in the mobility process a steady state majority could even be simultaneously poorer than average in terms of current income and richer than average in terms of expected future incomes a e rst empirical assessment suggests on the other hand that in recent u s data the poum effect is probably dominated by the demand for social insurance in the future everyone will be world famous for e fteen minutes andy warhol 1968

assessing productive efficiency of banks using integrated fuzzy dea and bootstrapping a case of mozambican banks performance analysis has become a vital part of the management practices in the banking industry there are numerous applications using dea models to estimate efficiency in banking and most of them assume that inputs and outputs are known with absolute precision here we propose new fuzzy dea level models to assess underlying uncertainty further bootstrap truncated regressions with fixed factors are used to measure the impact of each model on the efficiency scores and to identify the most relevant contextual variables on efficiency the proposed models have been demonstrated using an application in mozambican banks to handle the underlying uncertainty findings reveal that fuzziness is predominant over randomness in interpreting the results in addition fuzziness can be used by decision makers to identify missing variables to help in interpreting the results price of labor price of capital and market share were found to be the significant factors in measuring bank efficiency managerial implications are addressed

impact of financial reforms on efficiency of state owned private and foreign banks in pakistan this article uses a unique bank level data from 1991 to 2000 and evaluates how financial reforms affect banking efficiency of domestic and foreign banks in pakistan the results suggest that banking efficiency falls during initial reform period when banks adjust to enhanced competition but increases in more advanced stages of reform while in general foreign and private banks show superior efficiency and factor productivity than do state owned banks the relative performance of foreign banks worsens after the consolidation stage of the financial reforms is over we show the importance of link between bank size asset quality and bank branches with efficiency indexes and also note that every 10 increase in share of nonperforming to total loans decreases banking efficiency by 6 to 10

economics and identity this paper considers how identity a person s sense of self affects economic outcomes we incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior in the utility function we propose identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave we then construct a simple game theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions the paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace the economics of poverty and social exclusion and the household division of labor in each case the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis

linkages between decentralisation and inequalities in neonatal health evidence from indonesia this study uses five waves of the indonesian demographic health surveys to analyse decentralisation and geographical inequality in health services delivery accounting for unobserved community level heterogeneity with random effects and correlated random effects models we link facility based birth delivery to the period of decentralisation and indonesia s major island groups using a pooled sample of 71 815 children we also generate direct estimates of neonatal mortality from 1990 to 2007 the results show that the implementation of decentralisation has accorded with a marked expansion in both health service and outcome inequalities in indonesia at least with respect to neonates systemic funding failures for health and decision space issues resulting from decentralisation are likely to have greater impact in disadvantaged regions where local capacity is weakest the need to address these fundamental issues to reduce inequalities and improve general health outcomes appears supportable

intellectual capital and firm performance evidence from indian banking sector in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis the entire indian banking industry was paralysed and their performance was shattered by the unfolding of enormous cases of non performing assets npa

efficiency and credit rating in taiwan banking data envelopment analysis estimation in this article we use the data envelopment analysis to measure the efficiency of banks before and after credit rating is taken into consideration and we also employ the malmquist productivity index to measure the total factor productivity changes from 2001 to 2003 the results are as follows 1 there is a positive relationship between the efficiency scores and credit rating and thus the credit rating can be a representative to evaluate the performance and quality of a bank 2 we use the wilconxon two sample test of nonparametric statistic to test the influences of credit rating the empirical result shows that the credit rating is proven to influence the efficiency of banks 3 the efficiency scores improve in both investment grade above tw bbb and speculation grade under tw bbb when credit rating is taken into consideration the empirical results show that the efficiency scores of banks with a high credit rating improved relatively more when compared to banks with a lower credit rating

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

wto challenges and efficiency of chinese banks after joining the world trade organisation wto in december 2001 china was given 5 years to completely open up its banking market for international competition chinese banks have been renowned for their mounting nonperforming loans and low efficiency despite gradual reforms the banking system is still dominated by state ownership and encapsulated monopolistic control how to raise efficiency is a key to the survival and success of domestic banks especially the state owned commercial banks two important factors may be responsible for raising efficiency ownership reform and hard budget constraints this article uses a panel data of 22 banks over the period 1995 to 2001 and employs a stochastic frontier production function to investigate the effects of ownership structure and hard budget constraint on efficiency empirical results suggest that nonstate banks were 8 18 more efficient than state banks and that banks facing a harder budget tend to perform better than those heavily capitalized by the

preferences for redistribution in the land of opportunities this paper explores how individual preferences for redistribution depend on future income prospects in addition to estimating the impact of individuals socioeconomic background and of their subjective perceptions of future mobility we employ panel data to construct dobjectivet measures of expected gains and losses from redistribution for different categories of individuals we find that such measures have considerable explanatory power and perform better than dgeneral mobilityt indexes we also find that preferences for redistribution respond to individual beliefs on what determines one s position in the social ladder ceteris paribus people who believe that the american society offers equal opportunities are more averse to redistribution d 2004 published by elsevier b v

consistency in performance rankings the peru water sector regulators can utilize a number of alternative methodologies for comparing firm efficiency but these approaches need to be robust to be accepted by stakeholders this study evaluates the consistency of water utility performance rankings for peruvian water utilities the results indicate that data envelopment analysis dea and stochastic frontier analysis sfa yield similar rankings in this case in addition the techniques have comparable success for identifying the best and worst performing utilities however these rankings based on sophisticated statistical techniques are not highly correlated with those developed by the peruvian water regulator sunass this result does not invalidate the performance rankings obtained by the regulator since those rankings are based on more dimensions of utility performance however they illustrate the importance of developing sound techniques for identifying weak utilities improvements in sector performance require that benchmarking be given greater attention t

social preferences self interest and the demand for redistribution preferences for redistribution may be influenced by values and beliefs about distributive justice as well as by self interest people may prefer more redistribution to the poor if they believe that poverty is caused by circumstances beyond individual control therefore beliefs about the causes of income may affect demand for redistribution alternatively the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences may be spurious if they are correlated with income and self interest is not properly controlled for they may also measure incentive cost concerns using social survey data i find that self interest cannot explain the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

group income and individual preferences for redistribution this paper empirically examines the relationship between group income and an individual s preferences for redistribution first i develop a theoretical framework where an individual s identity is strengthened by the status of their group then utilizing data from the us general social survey i find evidence that the average incomes of one s ethnic and religious groups are negatively correlated with one s preferences for redistribution controlling for household income and a number of other individual level characteristics and additional controls i find that a standard deviation increase in the average income of one s social groups correlates to a weakening of an individual s preferences for redistribution by 7 to 8 this result is robust to the inclusion of rich controls and alternate measures of group status as well as a number of robustness checks such as sample restrictions and the use of additional data

does decentralization increase government responsiveness to local needs evidence from bolivia this paper examines whether decentralization increases the responsiveness of public investment to local needs using a unique database from bolivia empirical tests show that investment patterns in human capital and social services changed significantly after decentralization these changes are strongly and positively related to objective indicators of need nationally these changes were driven by the smallest poorest municipalities investing devolved funds in their highest priority projects the findings contradict common claims that local government is too corrupt institutionally weak or prone to interest group capture to improve upon central government s allocation of public resources d 2002 published by elsevier b v

estimating the wetland rental fee a case study involving a taiwan wetland wetlands provide many functions that are both economic and recreational and are valuable in terms of their ecological diversity while at the same time being nonmarket value products the purpose of this study is to estimate the optimal wetland rental through estimations of both the demand and supply functions in relation to wetland the wetland supply function is directly estimated based on the data provided by the owners of the wetland while the estimation of the wetland input demand function involves using the bootstrapping and contingent visitation approaches such estimation approaches could also be applied to other nonmarket value products that give rise to environmental externalities the estimation of rental fee could provide a long term leasing contract that gives the landlord with a particular rent to lease their lands to support a wetland eco tourism park to maintain wetland for substantial management several environmental management policy implications are also addressed

bank office outreach structure and performance in regional banking markets burgstaller j bank office outreach structure and performance in regional banking markets regional studies this paper studies bank penetration market structure and banking conduct across austrian districts neither differences in market concentration nor in the activity of out of market banks can explain the regional dispersion of interest rates bank profitability and efficiency a higher bank density is connected to more competition and lower mark ups and indicates more efficient banking markets as well as efficiency is the main determinant of bank profits and competition seems to be mildly indicative of stronger regional growth the preservation of a fair regional bank outreach appears to be an important policy target burgstaller j burgstaller j le rayon d action des guichets ban

on the sources of heterogeneity in banking efficiency literature one learns two main lessons from studying the great quantity of banking efficiency literature these lessons regard the heterogeneity in results and the absence of a comprehensive review aimed at understanding the reasons for this variability surprisingly although this issue is well known it has not been systematically analyzed before in order to fill this gap we perform a meta regression analysis mra by examining 1 661 efficiency scores retrieved from 120 papers published over the period 2000 2014 the meta regression is estimated by using the random effects multilevel model reml because it controls for within study and between study heterogeneity the analysis yields four main results firstly parametric methods yield lower levels of banking efficiency than nonparametric studies this holds true even after controlling for the approach used in selecting the inputs and outputs of the frontier secondly we show that banking efficiency is highest when using the value added approach followed by estimates from studies based on the intermediation method whereas those based on the hybrid approach are the lowest thirdly efficiency scores also depend on the quality of studies and on the number of observations and variables used in the primary papers as far as the effects of sample size dimension and quality of papers are concerned there are significant differences in sign and magnitude between parametric and nonparametric studies finally cost efficiency is found to be higher than profit and production efficiency interestingly mra results are robust to the potential outliers in efficiency and sample size distributions