organizational and individual learning and forgetting researchers of industrial relations issues in manufacturing have long recognized that careful study of production has significant implications for labor productivity recent theory and analysis has shown the large influence of organizational forgetting the authors of this study demonstrate that forgetting by workers in an establishment or line of production as a substantive characteristic of actual production processes is overstated and that alternative simpler theoretical and empirical explanations have at least as good explanatory power using inside the firm analysis they find that the omitted variable bias in other studies due to data limitations has the potential for spurious estimates of large forgetting rates by lines of work further they find that forgetting although important and interesting is not as influential as previous work for labor productivity has suggested further analysis of the production function and the role of organizational forgetting needs to be fully specified in a model to include internal production and labor relations characteristics like those in this study to be a plausible model of the production process within manufacturing establishments

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

transfers to sustain dynamic core theoretic cooperation in international stock pollutant control international environmental agreements aiming at correcting negative externalities generated by transboundary pollution are difficult to achieve for many reasons important obstacles arise from asymmetry in costs and benefits and instability may occur due to the fact that coalitions of countries may attempt to do better for themselves outside of any proposed agreement in a static context it has already been shown that it is possible to achieve stability in the sense of the core of a co operative game by means of appropriately defined transfers between the countries involved however the transboundary pollution problems that are most important are caused by accumulated pollutants so that a dynamic analysis is required this paper provides a transfer scheme that yields a core property in a dynamic context the possibility of computing such transfers numerically is discussed

international environmental agreements for river sharing problems we study partial coalition formation and the strategic timing of membership of an iea for environmental issues in the coalitional bargaining game cbg of gomes econometrica 73 1329 1350 2005 we apply the cbg to a specific river sharing problem with two symmetric upstream agents each at a tributary and one downstream agent located at the junction of tributaries we identify five regions in the parameter space of a discount factor and a productivity parameter for water in one region the grand coalition always forms immediately in two other regions immediate formation of the grand coalition and gradual coalition formation both occur with positive probability in another two regions only gradual coalition formation occurs in one of these latter regions a region with discount factors close to one both upstream agents form a monopoly with positive probability formation of the monopoly persists in the limit as the discount factor goes to one

optimal investment in learning curve technologies we study optimal investment in technologies characterized by the learning curve there are two investment patterns depending on the shape of the learning curve if the learning process is slow firms invest relatively late and on a larger scale if the curve is steep firms invest earlier and on a smaller scale we further demonstrate that learning investment differs greatly from investment in technologies without learning effects learning investments generate substantial initial losses and are very sensitive to downside risk we show that the most susceptible to losses and risk are technologies with intermediate speed of learning

the nonparametric risk adjusted efficiency measurement an application to taiwan s major rural financial intermediaries in this article a nonparametric approach is used to incorporate risk into the measurement of technical efficiencies of the major financial intermediaries in rural taiwan risk is treated as a joint but undesirable output given the fact that various regulatory actions may prevent its free disposability three risk indicators nonperforming loans allowance for loan losses and risky assets are employed alternatively in the empirical work results suggest that all three risk constraints are binding regulations on controlling risky assets and loan loss reserves are effective but more burdensome than those on controlling loan quality

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

the stability and effectiveness of climate coalitions a comparative analysis of multiple integrated assessment models we report results from a comparison of numerically calibrated game theoretic integrated assessment models that explore the stability and performance of international coalitions for climate change mitigation we identify robust results concerning the incentives of different nations to commit themselves to a climate agreement and estimate the extent of greenhouse gas mitigation that can be achieved by stable agreements we also assess the potential of transfers that redistribute the surplus of cooperation to foster the stability of climate coalitions in contrast to much of the existing analytical game theoretical literature we find substantial scope for self enforcing climate coalitions in most models that close much of the abatement and welfare gap between complete absence of cooperation and full cooperation this more positive message follows from the use of appropriate transfer schemes that are designed to counteract free riding incentives

leadership and free riding decomposing and explaining the paradox of cooperation in international environmental agreements this paper decomposes the canonical model of international environmental agreements barrett in oxf econ pap 46 878 894 1994 into three effects externality cost effectiveness and timing the externality and timing effects are countervailing forces on abatement levels of greenhouse gases the paradox of cooperation in the three stage stackelberg game is explained by showing that when the gains to cooperation are small the timing effect dominates the externality effect and large coalitions are stable the timing effect has the greatest impact when the high benefit nations have low abatement cost the cost effectiveness effect arises from asymmetry and generates the need for an agreement with transfers the cost effectiveness effect is largest when the high benefit nations are high cost this creates a larger difference in the marginal abatement cost of the last unit of abatement in the absence of an agreement numerical examples illustrate how the parameters and effects interact to result in outcomes ranging from no to full participation

how much did the liberty shipbuilders learn new evidence for an old case study this paper offers some new estimates of the contribution of learning to the rapid increases in labor productivity observed in the construction of liberty ships during world war ii the study exploits new data on physical capital investment and vessel quality constructed from contemporary records held at the national archives estimates of the rate of learning are shown to be sensitive to the inclusion of the new capital data and data on vessel quality provide evidence that part of the measured productivity increases were secured at the expense of quality

international environmental agreements the role of foresight the present paper attempts to bridge the gap between the cooperative and the non cooperative approach employed to examine the size of stable coalitions formed to address global environmental problems we do so by endowing countries with foresightedness that is by endogenizing the reaction of the coalition s members to a deviation by one member we assume that when a country contemplates withdrawing or joining an agreement it takes into account the reactions of other countries ignited by its own actions we identify conditions under which there always exists a unique set of farsighted stable ieas the new farsighted ieas can be much larger than those some of the previous models supported but are not always pareto efficient

super efficiency evaluations based on potential slack abstract super efficiency evaluations are introduced along the lines of the potential improvements approach in journal of productivity analysis 12 1999 233 both a reference selection and a related super efficiency index are defined the new potential slack super efficiency index is compared to a farrell based super efficiency index as in management science 39 1993 1261 with respect to convex envelopment technologies

the role of uncertainty and learning for the success of international climate agreements abstract transnational externalities e g transboundary pollution trade contagious diseases and terrorism warrant coordination and cooperation between governments but this proves often difficult one reason for the meager success is the public good character of many of these economic problems encouraging free riding another reason one might suspect is uncertainty surrounding most environmental problems and in particular climate change this provides often an excuse for remaining inactive paradoxically some recent papers have concluded just the opposite the veil of uncertainty can be conducive to the success of international environmental cooperation in this paper we explain why and under which conditions this can be true however we argue that those conditions are the exception rather than the rule most important we suggest a mechanism for those conditions where learning has a negative effect on the success of cooperation which removes this effect or even turns it into a positive effect our results apply beyond the specifics of climate change to similar problems where cooperation generates positive externalities

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

the impact of adaptation on the stability of international environmental agreements we examine the stability of international environmental agreements that include clauses pertaining to both adaptation and mitigation measures we assume that adaptation requires a prior irreversible investment and presents the characteristics of a private good by reducing a country s vulnerability to the impact of pollution while mitigation policies produce a public good by reducing the total amount of pollution using a stylized model we show that adaptive measures can be used strategically and that their inclusion in environmental agreements enhances agreement stability and can even lead to full cooperation we examine the robustness of agreements including both adaptation and mitigation measures against renegotiation finally we evaluate how including adaptive measures for climate change in international environmental agreements affects welfare and overall pollution

the acid rain differential game this paper considers an acid rain differential game countries emit sulphur which is partly transferred to other countries depositions above critical loads ultimately destroy the soil countries face a trade off between the costs of emission reductions and the damage to the soil due to the depletion of the acid buffers because of the transboundary externalities the outcome will depend on whether the countries cooperate or not this paper presents the cooperative outcome and the open loop and markov perfect nash equilibria of the acid rain differential game it will be shown that the depositions always converge to the critical loads but the steady state levels of the buffer stocks differ the theory is used to analyse the acid rain differential game for sulphur between great britain and ireland finally some results are given for the whole of europe

the economics of predation what drives pricing when there is learning by doing predatory pricing a deliberate strategy of pricing aggressively in order to eliminate competitors is one of the more contentious areas of antitrust policy and its existence and efficacy are widely debated the purpose of this paper is to formally characterize predatory pricing in a modern industry dynamics framework that endogenizes competitive advantage and industry structure our framework encompasses important phenomena such as learning by doing network effects switching costs dynamic demand and certain types of adjustment costs due to its prominent role in legal cases involving alleged predation we examine learning by doing in more detail we first show that predation like behavior arises routinely in our learning by doing model equilibria involving predation like behavior typically coexist with equilibria involving much less aggressive pricing to disentangle predatory pricing from mere competition for efficiency on a learning curve we next decompose the equilibrium pricing condition and develop alternative characterizations of a firm s predatory pricing incentives we finally measure the impact of these incentives on industry structure conduct and performance we show that forcing a firm to ignore the predatory incentives in setting its price can have a large impact and that this impact stems from eliminating equilibria with predation like behavior along with the predation like behavior however a fair amount of competition for the market is eliminated

note ranking dmus with infeasible super efficiency dea models it has been suggested in the data envelopment analysis dea literature that it is impossible to obtain a full ranking of decision making units dmus when infeasible subproblems arise in the so called super efficiency dea models under different returns to scale rts assumptions other than constant returns to scale crs andconsequently the application of the super efficiency dea models under different rts conditions other than crs should be restricted the implications of the infeasibility in super efficiency dea models with respect to the efficiency ranking of the dmus is explored based on the analysis we show that it is still possible to obtain the full ranking of the entire observation set when infeasibilities arise in super efficiency dea models

evolution of reciprocity in asymmetric international environmental negotiations we study the success of generalised trigger strategies in the evolution of cooperation in international environmental negotiations where the performance of these strategies is derived from asymmetric n player prisoners dilemmas our results suggest that there exist regions in the relevant parameter space i e costs and benefits low and high tit for tat thresholds probability of continued interaction such that partial cooperation may emerge as long run attractor of the evolutionary dynamics in these asymmetric social dilemmas

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

environmental consciousness and moral hazard in international agreements to protect the environment abstract a group of countries that can potentially commit to cooperation to protect the environment are identified as environmentally conscious countries conditions are examined under which they can provide self financing side payments too a second group of less environmentally conscious countries so that the two groups form a global or partial stable coalition that agrees to reduce emissions a mechanism that detects cheating is also developed in order to induce the desired emissions even when the emissions level of an individual country cannot be observed by the rest of the participating countries

the corona pandemic a game theoretic perspective on regional and global governance we argue that the incentive structure of all individual and coordinated measures across countries to contain the corona pandemic is that of a weakest link public good game we discuss a selection of theoretical and experimental key results of weakest link games and interpret them in the light of the corona pandemic first we highlight that experimental evidence does not support the assumption that coordination can be trivially solved even among symmetric players second we argue that for asymmetric countries the weakest link game does not only pose a problem of coordination but also a problem of cooperation third we show how and under which conditions self enforcing treaties can foster coordination and cooperation we account for the possibility that countries make mistakes when choosing their actions our discussion shows that north south cooperation is relevant and likely to be self enforcing and that regional cooperation e g within the eu will also be important

labour unrest and the quality of production evidence from the construction equipment resale market this paper examines the construction equipment resale market to assess whether equipment produced by the world s largest manufacturer of construction machinery caterpillar experienced lower product quality in facilities that underwent contract disputes during the 1990 s analysis of auction data reveals that resale market participants significantly discounted machines produced in these dispute affected facilities additionally pieces of equipment produced in facilities undergoing unrest were resold more often received worse appraisal reports and had lower list prices taken together the evidence supports the hypothesis that workmanship at dispute affected facilities declined and that the resulting impact on the economic quality of the equipment produced was significant the dispute was associated with at least 400 million in lost service flows due to inferior quality equipment alone

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

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

sharing a fish stock when distribution and harvest costs are density dependent we studied cooperative and competitive solutions for managing a trans boundary fish stock that has a stock size dependent distribution and harvesting costs using norwegian spring spawning nss herring clupea harengus as a case study this is among the first studies to investigate the effect of a dynamic distribution in a partition function game framework i e including externalities the special feature of nss herring is that it comes under the sole ownership of norway when the stock size is sufficiently low the three players in our game are differentiated by stock ownership cost per unit effort and stock elasticity of harvest we find that cost asymmetry improves the likelihood of forming a stable grand coalition as harvesting load can be assigned to each fishing zone according to a player s relative cost level and the density of fish a dynamic distribution increases the bargaining power of norway because of her ability to control both the total stock and the stock shares in different zones especially during the stock transition years however the bargaining power of norway may disappear if her cost of harvesting exceeds that of the other players this loss of bargaining power can take on two forms first a dynamic distribution may encourage a minor player to free ride because norway needing a coalition partner to improve her cost effectiveness would be less inclined to retaliate as retaliation hurts her ally as much as the free rider second in a stable grand coalition norway is not guaranteed to receive an allocation of benefit shares in proportion to not to say in excess of her stock ownership at the current stock condition the strategy where norway reduces stock abundance below the level where the stock becomes non migratory is found attractive only if the discounting rate is sufficiently high

valuation methods and policy making in environmental economics 1 valuation methods and policy making in environmental economics relevance and scope h folmer e van ierland part i the valuation of public goods 2 non market asset prices a comparison of three valuation approaches r c d arge j f shogren 3 valuing public goods in a risky world an experiment p o johansson 4 recreational values pareto optimality and timber supply p o johansson k g lofgren k g maler 5 estimating social benefits of environmental improvements from reduced acid rain deposition a contingent valuation survey s navrud part ii the valuation of health and life 6 benefits of reduced morbidity from air pollution control a survey m dickie s gerking 7 valuing a public good direct and indirect valuation approaches to the measurement of the benefits from air pollution abatement m shechter m kim l golan 8 environmental regulation and the valuation of life interindustry mobility and the market price of safety h w herzog jr a m schlottmann part iii cost benefit analysis 9 disequilibrium cost benefit rules an exposition and extension p o johansson k g lofgren 10 macroeconomic cost benefit analysis of environmental programmes a nentjes part iv aspects of policy making 11 benefit estimation for complex policies a randall j hoehn 12 the acid rain game k g maler index

international environmental agreements on climate protection a binary choice model with heterogeneous agents abstract climate change poses a major challenge to present and future generations our analysis focuses on international environmental agreements ieas entered into by countries that decide rationally and autonomously on whether to adopt a climate friendly policy this raises the question how many and which countries will sign such an iea in addition to material incentives to combat climate change issues pertaining to justice and fairness motivate reciprocal behavior even during international negotiations integrating reciprocity preferences may stimulate cooperation and thus increase participation in an iea however there is some evidence that fairness also stabilizes small sized iea coalitions hence this gives rise to the following open question under which conditions does reciprocity have an enhanced and harmful impact on an iea furthermore we introduce heterogeneity with respect to a country s emphasis on reciprocity the costs it incurs when implementing a climate friendly policy its benefits from preventing negative consequences of climate change and country size in addition the present paper examines which countries might or might not sign an iea and identifies the characteristics that determine a country s participation or non participation in a coalition

can international environmental cooperation be bought comment abstract fuentes albero and rubio 2010 analytically examine the effects of the countries heterogeneity on the international environmental cooperation they consider two types of countries having different abatement costs in one case and different environmental damages in another case furthermore it is analyzed whether a self financed transfer system can diminish these heterogeneity effects the paper shows for both scenarios of asymmetry and no transfers that the maximum level of cooperation consists of three countries of the same type for the case of heterogeneity in environmental damages fuentes albero and rubio conclude that an agreement between one type 1 and one type 2 country is also self enforcing given that the differences in the damages are not very large in this comment the derivation of the last mentioned result is shown to be incorrect by proving that this coalition is not self enforcing

are scale economies in banking elusive or illusive evidence obtained by incorporating capital structure and risk taking into models of bank production abstract this paper explores how to incorporate banks capital structure and risk taking into models of production in doing so the paper bridges the gulf between 1 the banking literature that studies moral hazard effects of bank regulation without considering the underlying microeconomics of production and 2 the literature that uses dual profit and cost functions to study the microeconomics of bank production without explicitly considering how banks production decisions influence their riskiness various production models that differ in how they account for capital structure and in the objectives they impute to bank managers cost minimization versus value maximization are estimated using u s data on highest level bank holding companies modeling the bank s objective as value maximization conveniently incorporates both market priced risk and expected cash flow into managers ranking and choice of production plans estimated scale economies are found to depend critically on how banks capital structure and risk taking are modeled in particular when equity capital in addition to debt is included in the production model and cost is computed from the value maximizing expansion path rather than the cost minimizing path banks are found to have large scale economies that increase with size moreover better diversification is associated with larger scale economies while increased risk taking and inefficient risk taking are associated with smaller scale economies

a theory of dynamic oligopoly iii cournot competition abstract we study the markov perfect equilibrium mpe of an alternating move infinite horizon duopoly model where the strategic variable is quantity we exhibit a pair of difference differential equations that when they exist differentiable mpe strategies satisfy for quadratic payoff functions we solve these equations in closed form and demonstrate that the mpe corresponding to the solution is the limit of the finite horizon equilibrium as the horizon tends to infinity we conclude with a discussion of adjustment costs and endogenization of the timing

learning by doing organizational forgetting and industry dynamics learning by doing and organizational forgetting have been shown to be important in a variety of industrial settings this paper provides a general model of dynamic competition that accounts for these economic fundamentals and shows how they shape industry structure and dynamics previously obtained results regarding the dominance properties of flrms pricing behavior no longer hold in this more general setting we show that forgetting does not simply negate learning rather learning and forgetting are distinct economic forces in particular a model with learning and forgetting can give rise to aggressive pricing behavior market dominance and multiple equilibria whereas a model with learning alone cannot

equity development and climate change control the paper analyzes the effects of different equity principles on the decision of developing countries to join a world coalition whose aim is to control greenhouse gas emissions a game theoretic framework is proposed to assess the incentives for different countries to sign an international treaty on climate change control then the effects of different equity rules on these incentives are evaluated by using a dynamic integrated growth and climate model policy proposals based on transfers from developed to developing countries are also analyzed jel c7 h0 h3 q38

the environmental kuznets curve semi parametrically revisited this paper re examines the existence of an environmental kuznets curve ekc across countries using a semi parametric regression estimator which places no restrictions on the functional form our results using cross country panel data on sulfur and carbon dioxide strongly suggest that the relationship between wealth and environmental degradation is not bell shaped as suggested by an ekc rather that there is a positive link for the very poorest countries and no clear relationship for richer countries

managing dynamic competition in many important high technology markets including software development data processing communications aeronautics and defense suppliers learn through experience how to provide better service at lower cost this paper examines how a buyer designs dynamic competition among rival suppliers to exploit learning economies while minimizing the costs of becoming locked in to one producer strategies for controlling dynamic competition include the handicapping of more efficient suppliers in procurement competitions the protection and allocation of intellectual property and the sharing of information among rival suppliers jel c73 d44 l10

the anti paradox of cooperation diversity may pay abstract this paper considers the stability and success of a public good agreement we allow for any type and degree of asymmetry regarding benefits and costs we ask the question whether asymmetry and which type and degree of asymmetry is conducive to cooperation we employ a simple non cooperative game theoretic model of coalition formation and derive analytical solutions for two scenarios an agreement without and with optimal transfers a central message of the paper is that asymmetry does not have to be an obstacle for successful cooperation but can be an asset we qualify two central results in the literature firstly the paradox of cooperation known since barrett 1994 and reiterated by many others afterwards stating that under those conditions when cooperation would matter most stable agreements achieve only little secondly a kind of coalition folk theorem known without proof in the literature for a long time stating that without transfers stable coalitions will be smaller with asymmetric than symmetric players we show that even without transfers the grand coalition can be stable if there is a negative covariance between benefit and cost parameters with massive gains from cooperation moreover with transfers many distributions of benefit and cost parameters lead to a stable grand coalition again some of them implying huge gains from cooperation stability and success greatly benefit from a very skewed asymmetric distribution of benefit and costs i e diversity may pay

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

can international environmental cooperation be bought in this paper a two stage game of international environmental agreement formation with asymmetric countries is analytically solved the equilibrium of the game makes it possible to determine the size and composition of a stable agreement two cases are studied in the first case countries differ only in abatement costs while in the second case they differ in environmental damages in both cases two different institutional settings one without transfers and another with transfers are considered the results establish that the asymmetry assumption has no important effects on the scope of cooperation in comparison with the symmetric case if transfers are not used or abatement costs represent the only difference among countries however when the only difference is in environmental damages the level of cooperation that can be bought through a self financed transfer scheme increases with the degree of asymmetry

cooperation on climate change mitigation abstract we analyze conditions under which it is possible to achieve efficient mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions with a self enforcing international agreement in which all countries find it in their self interest to abide by the agreement we model the choice of emissions by countries as a dynamic game we use a two part punishment scheme for deviations from an agreement that is renegotiation proof and show when this scheme supports the efficient outcome as a subgame perfect equilibrium using numerical examples we show that an efficient subgame perfect equilibrium exists for a range of reasonable parameter values the existence of such equilibrium may be non monotonic in the discount rate and the ratio of slope of marginal abatement cost and marginal damages

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

what s experience got to do with it sources of cost reduction in a large specialty chemicals producer conventional learning curves relating unit cost to measures of production experience are estimated for 221 specialty chemicals produced by a fortune 500 company detailed records on cost and r d coupled with insights from company personnel are used to explain the variation across products in the rate of cost reduction products that exhibited the strongest relationship between unit cost and measures of production experience were subject to specific initiatives particularly process r d the r d was not however generally motivated or informed by production experience however cumulative past output the most commonly used measure of production experience was related to expected future output which conditioned the expected future returns from r d and the choice of r d projects thus cumulative output was connected to unit costs through its role in conditioning incentives to undertake process r d rather than as a proxy for production experience this suggests that the strong relationship commonly found between unit cost and measures of production experience may reflect incentives to reduce cost as much as learning from production experience

how much did the liberty shipbuilders forget this paper produces new estimates of the rate of organizational forgetting in the well known case study of u s wartime ship production estimates obtained using data constructed from primary sources at the national archives yield rates of forgetting that are much smaller than previously reported and may well be zero the richness of the data makes it possible to control for variations in the product mix to explore alternative formulations for the learning curve and to investigate the relationship between organizational forgetting and labor turnover

technical change organizational form and the structure of bank production of those technological characteristics related to the nature of competition among firms in an industry or market scale economies and technical change are especially important economies of scale are said to exist when an equiproportional increase in all inputs results in a greater than proportional increase in output or equivalently when an increase in output at constant input prices leads to a less than proportional increase in total costs thus average costs decline as output expands depending upon the extent to which costs decline as output increases regulation of the firms in the industry may be necessary l the literature analyzing scale economies in commercial banking is voluminous the early studies on scale economies in banking include those by benston 1965 1972 greenbaum 1967 murphy 1972 and bell and murphy 1968 more recent studies include those by benston hanweck and humphrey 1982 and clark 1984 2 this literature has established that mild scale economies exist in bank

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

the design of stable international environmental agreements economic theory and political economy international environmental agreements typically strive for the solution of a common property resource dilemma since the sovereignty of states precludes external enforcement international environmental agreements must be self enforcing game theoretical models explain why rewards and punishments imposed through the environmental externality generally fail to enforce full cooperation therefore environmental treaties incorporate provisions that enhance the incentives for participation such as transfers sanctions and linkage to other negotiation topics in international politics moreover interaction with markets and governments as well as the rules and procedures adopted in the negotiation process influence the design and the effectiveness of an international environmental agreement

a non radial malmquist productivity index with an illustrative application to chinese major industries abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of peer units when multiple outputs and inputs are present dea based malmquist productivity index measures the technical and productivity changes over time the current study extends the malmquist productivity index into a non radial index where the decision maker s preference over performance improvement can be incorporated the non radial malmquist productivity index eliminates possible inefficiency represented by the non zero slacks the method is applied to measure the productivity change of three chinese major industries textiles chemicals and metallurgicals during four five year plan periods the paper shows how dea based malmquist productivity index can be employed to evaluate the technology and productivity changes resulted from the economic development plans the paper also shows the importance of using the non radial malmquist productivity index

firm efficiency and the regulatory closure of s ls an empirical investigation this paper uses a two step methodology to examine the relationship between firm inefficiency and the regulatory closure of savings and loans s ls in the first step using multiproduct translog stochastic cost frontiers the authors estimate inefficiency scores separately for mutual and stock s ls operating in the southwest in 1988 they use the inefficiency scores in second step logit models to identify determinants of regulatory closure for both mutual and stock s ls the authors find a significant positive relationship between firm inefficiency and regulatory closure they also find a greater probability of closure for s ls in economically depressed states copyright 1993 by mit press

international cooperation for sale abstract this paper shows that strong asymmetry among countries warrants a change in the rules of the game of global public goods provision with the consequence that cooperation by some countries is bought by others and aggregate welfare is increased perhaps substantially side payments on their own have virtually no effect on the outcomes that can be sustained by self enforcing cooperative agreements but when the rules of the game are changed by strong asymmetry when some countries are effectively committed to being non signatories to an agreement eschewing money transfers side payments become the vehicle for increasing participation in a cooperative agreement

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

detection and impact of industrial subsidies the case of world shipbuilding this paper provides a model based empirical strategy to i detect the presence and gauge the magnitude of government subsidies and ii quantify their impact on production reallocation across countries industry prices costs and consumer surplus i construct and estimate an industry model that allows for dynamic agents in both demand and supply and apply my strategy to world shipbuilding a classic target of industrial policy i nd strong evidence consistent with china having intervened and reducing shipyard costs by 15 20 corresponding to 5 billion us dollars between 2006 and 2012 the subsidies led to substantial reallocation of ship production across the world with japan in particular losing signi cant market share they also misaligned costs and production while leading to minor surplus gains for shippers

global refunding and climate change abstract we design a global refunding scheme as a new international approach to address climate change participating in the global refunding system requires an initial payment it allows each country to set its carbon emission tax while aggregate tax revenues are partially refunded to member countries in proportion to the relative emission reductions they achieve within a given period the refunding scheme reduces the intertemporal climate change problem into a static public goods problem in a simple model we show that a suitably designed global refunding scheme achieves the social global optimum provided that all countries participate we discuss several procedures to achieve initial participation

international environmental agreements the case of costly monetary transfers most existing international environmental agreements to resolve transboundary pollution problems appear constrained in the sense that either monetary transfers accompany uniform abatement standards agreements based on a uniform standard with monetary transfers or differentiated abatement standards are established but without monetary transfers agreements based on differentiated standards for two asymmetric countries facing the challenge of a transboundary pollution problem we compare the relative efficiency of these two second best agreements we study especially the role of the costs associated with transfer payments across countries in the choice of these agreements to conduct this analysis we use a negotiation game and the generalized nash bargaining solution nash in econometrica 21 128 140 1953 as the equilibrium for total welfare our findings show that countries collectively prefer the uniform to the differentiated agreement if the cost of transfers is sufficiently low compared to the ratio for countries of the difference of the abatement costs between the two agreements in the analysis of individual welfare we also discuss the reluctance of one country to sign a specific type of agreement even if it is better off than in the case of non cooperation

north south negotiations on emission reductions a bargaining approach this article models north south negotiations on emission reductions where the north provides side payments in exchange for the south s adoption of a more stringent emission standard we find that depending on where firms compete strong asymmetry among regions the two regions different valuations of side payments and climate change damage can produce self enforcing cooperative agreements moreover the south s optimal standard choice can be one of two polar cases i e either the cleanest or the dirtiest irrespective of the continuum of standards available the results above can also hold true when both parties bargain over the south s emission tax

a regional dynamic general equilibrium model of alternative climate change strategies outcomes and noncooperative equilibria this study finds that cooperative policies show much higher levels of emissions reductions than do noncooperative strategies that there are substantial differences in the levels of controls in both the cooperative and the noncooperative policies among different countries and that high income countries may be the major losers from cooperation jel h41 q4 q2 q20

a dynamic game of waste management abstract the paper studies a differential game of waste management disposal each of three neighbouring regions is endowed with a stock of waste but no additional waste is generated in any region and waste does not decay from natural reasons a region s stock of waste can be reduced only by dumping on its neighbours the model features two externalities a strategic externality caused by the fact that the payoff of a coalition depends on the actions of players outside the coalition and a stock externality caused by the fixed overall amount of waste the game has a finite time horizon and it is shown that intertemporal core theoretic cooperation can be sustained under intuitive conditions

game theoretic models for climate change negotiations abstract negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere are modeled as extensive games of perfect information various solution concepts such as nash equilibrium reaction function equilibrium correlated equilibrium and bargaining solutions are applied analyzed and computed special reduction techniques are used when the size of the game tree becomes excessive a new solution concept the tree correlated equilibrium is also introduced main features of an excel add in designed to compute various solutions are briefly described and a sample policy analysis for a special negotiating scenario is discussed

technical efficiency and scale efficiency in the italian banking sector a non parametric approach measures of technical and scale efficiencies are derived in the italian banking industries by implementing non parametric data envelopment analysis on a cross section of 174 italian banks taken in 1991 the methodology of the parametric and non parametric approaches to measure efficiency are discussed the existence of both technical and allocative efficiency is established this result is robust to modifications in the specification of inputs and outputs suggested by the intermediation approach and by the asset approach in implementing both the intermediation and the asset approach the traditional specification of inputs is modified to allow an explicit role for financial capital in addition regression analysis is used on a bank specific measure of inefficiency to investigate determinants of banks efficiency efficiency is best explained by productive specialization size and to a lesser extent by location

international aspects of pollution control pollution is a by product of production is only gradually dissolved by the environment and crosses national borders the market outcome ignores the adverse effects of pollution and thus yields higher levels of output and pollution than would prevail under a supranational social planner which does care about pollution in practice governments often do not cooperate and this leads to outcomes of pollution and production in between the market outcomes and the outcomes under supra national social planning absence of precommitment leads to lower emission charges less cleaning up activities and more pollution appropriate levels of emission charges under the various outcomes are a result of this analysis attention is also paid to investment in clean technology the debate between optimists who believe that higher production is compatible with sound environmental policy and pessimists can be analysed in this way