In this paper we seek a robust methodology to measure the relative public spending efficiency of 19 OECD countries over the period 1980-2000. Based on the functional classification of government expenditure, we decompose total public spending into its separate accounts and we employ a...

This paper empirically examines the relationship between fiscal decentralization and public sector efficiency. A country-level dataset is used to measure public sector efficiency in delivering education and health services and the new indices are regressed on well-established decentralization...

We explore in this paper how trading noise, when considered as a market friction, reacts to trading activity. Transactions cost is a good explanation for intraday trading behavior in the market according to our data. Particularly, we show that in general trading brings friction to market....

We analyze in this study investor trading behavior based not on information related assumptions but on the search model of Vayanos and Wang (2007). Our study shows that search cost dictates trading polarization across investors, firm size and time of day. We find that individual investors prefer...

We analyze in this study what could have caused herding in the stock market. Information cascades have often been considered as a major cause. However, we present in this study evidences inconsistent with that hypothesis. Our analysis is in support of an alternative theory based on search cost...

The aim of this study is to provide a methodology for the joint estimation of efficiency and market power of individual banks. The proposed method utilizes the separate implications of the new empirical industrial organization and the stochastic frontier literatures and suggests identification...

The objective of this article is 2-fold. First, it provides an empirical assessment of the cost and profit stochastic frontiers based on a panel dataset of Greek commercial banks over the period 1993 to 2005. Second, on the basis of the same sample, it also compares the most widely used...

By examining the impact of capital regulation on bank risk-taking using a local estimation technique, we are able to quantify the heterogeneous response of banks towards this type of regulation in banking sectors of western-type economies. Subsequently, using this information on the bank-level...

We attempt to identify in this paper the role of trading noise as a transactions cost to market participant in the sense of Stoll (2000), especially in the presence of trading concentration. Applying the measures of Hu (2006) and Kang and Yeo (2008), we analyze the noise proportion in intraday...

This article proposes a general empirical method for the estimation of marginal cost of individual firms. The new method employs the smooth coefficient model, which has a number of appealing features when applied to cost functions. The empirical analysis uses data from a unique sample from which...