The question of whether or not mergers and acquisitions have helped to enhance banks' efficiency and profitability has not yet been conclusively resolved in the literature. We argue that this is partly due to the severe methodological problems involved. In this study, we analyze the effect of...

The stochastic frontier analysis (Aigner et al., 1977, Meeusen and van de Broeck, 1977) is widely used to estimate individual efficiency scores. The basic idea lies in the introduction of an additive error term consisting of a noise and an inefficiency term. Most often the assumption of a...

The paper explores the investment behaviour of German firms in the context of the Qapproach, which plays a dominant role in empirical investment research. The analysis is based on the Deutsche Bundesbank's corporate balance sheet statistics. The panel data set contains some 2,300 German firms'...

In our analysis we discuss several dynamic panel data estimators proposed in the literature and assess their performance in Monte Carlo simulations. It is a well known fact that the natural choice, the least squares dummy variable estimator is biased in the context of dynamic estimation. The...

Banks face a tradeoff between diversifying and focusing their loan portfolio. In this paper we carry out an empirical study for the German market to shed light on the question whether or not the benefits of risk sharing outweigh those of specialization. We use data from the Bundesbank's...