This article combines a discrete choice model of demand for residential local telephone access and an optimal price regulation model to estimate the welfare weights that state regulators place on consumers with different incomes and locations. I find no evidence of a bias towards rural consumers...

Using data on marginal interest rates of loan and deposit products by Spanish banks, we find that the level of interest rates on loans (deposits) across geographic markets decrease (increase) with the number of banks in each market, and that the level of interest rates on loans increases with...

The aim of this paper is to assess the level of competition prevailing in the Spanish banking system. The current analysis employs a widely used non-structural methodology put forward by Panzar and Rosse (1987) —the so-called H-statistic— and draws upon a comprehensive panel dataset of...

We use a simple analytical framework to study how idiosyncratic production shocks are smoothed through risksharing across Spanish provinces. By analyzing how production in the average province is successively smoothed until it is used as consumption, we find that half of the shocks have been...

In this paper, we put forth the view that the potential for urbanisation economies increases with interaction opportunities. On the basis of that premise, three properties are key to an agglomeration index, which should: (i) increase with the concentration of population and conform to the...

The observed high levels of banks’ operating efficiency, profi ts and market values in the years before the financial crisis raise reasonable doubts about the information content of conventional performance measures for the accurate assessment of the efficiency of banking intermediation. In...

Since the 1980s, important and progressive reforms have profoundly reshaped the structure of the Chinese banking system. Many empirical studies suggest that financial reform promoted bank competition in most mature and emerging economies. However, some earlier studies that adopted conventional...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...

Do laws to protect borrowers curb foreclosures? This question is addressed by analysing the impact of foreclosure laws on default rates at state level in the US mortgage market. Using panel data techniques, we find a statistically significant effect of regulation on the different stages of the...

This article estimates a general credit risk model with both macroeconomic and latent credit factors for Spanish banks during the period 2004-2010. The proposed framework allows to estimate with bank level data both the standard credit risk model of Basel II and generalized models. I fi nd...