This paper investigates whether the diversity of activities conducted by financial institutions influences their market valuations. We find that there is a diversification discount: The market values financial conglomerates that engage in multiple activities, e.g., lending and non-lending...

We empirically analyze the nature of returns to scale in active mutual fund management. We find strong evidence of decreasing returns at the industry level: As the size of the active mutual fund industry increases, a fund's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. At the fund level,...

This paper studies procyclical productivity growth at the industry level in the U.S. and in three European countries (France, Germany and the Netherlands). Industry-specific demand-side instruments are used to examine the prevalence of non-constant returns to scale and unmeasured input...

This paper calculates returns to scale and productivity growth in UK manufacturing establishments in the electronics and food industries. Our results show that foreign establishments tend to have lower returns to scale than their domestic counterparts. We also examine the effect of the...

This paper studies the implications of procyclical capital utilization rates for inference regarding cyclical movements in labour productivity and the degree of returns to scale. We organize our investigation around five questions that we study using a measure of capital services based on...

We analyze the equilibrium size of the active management industry and the role of historical data---how investors use it to decide how much to invest in the industry, and how researchers use it to judge whether the industry's size is reasonable. As the industry's size increases, every manager's...

This paper analyses how the levels of unemployment and vacancies affect the rate at which unemployed workers find employment -- the worker-firm `matching function'. In particular we test the robustness of previous empirical work by checking whether we obtain the same estimated function using...

The regional distribution of unemployment rates in the Czech Republic during the transition period is shown to be characterised by twin peaks, i.e. a high and a low unemployment equilibrium. The emergence of strong regional disparities at the beginning of the 1990s can, at least partially, be...

This paper estimates the degree of the returns to scale for 2-digit U.S. manufacturing industries from the output-based primal and price-based dual equations implied by firms' cost-minimization problems. It seeks to reconcile the cyclical behavior of the primal and dual productivity residuals by...