This paper examines the performance of the U.S.~commercial banking industry over 1984--2002. Rather than measuring performance relative to the unknown (and difficult-to-estimate) boundary of the production set, performance for a given bank is measured relative to {\it expected} maximum output...

A parental seller with market power to some degree in its product market can earn rents. In this context, there is a gain to granting credit for the purchase of the product and thus the establishment of captive finance company for expanding the sales by offering loans to consumers who need...

This paper examines the intensity of financial crises during the 1990s with a view to informing crisis prevention and mitigation policies. We compare the performance of a full Bayesian and an information-theoretic approach in addressing the econometric problems posed by the lack of a unifying...

Much of the statistical analysis for poverty measurement regards the data employed to estimate poverty statistics as error-free observations. However, it is amply recognized that surveys responses are not perfectly reliable and that the quality of the data is often poor, especially for...

We study participation and relative earnings in the formal, informal, and self-employed sectors in Bolivia. We estimate quantile earnings equations corrected for self-selectivity to address potential biases in the estimates of relative earnings gaps due to the endogeneity of sector...

Within the independent private-values paradigm, we derive the data-generating process of the winning bid for the last unit sold at sequential English auctions when bidder valuations are draws from one of several different classes of distributions; i.e., in the presence of asymmetries. When the...

A leading explanation of aggregate stock market behavior suggests that assets are priced as if there were a representative investor whose utility is a power function of the difference between aggregate consumption and a "habit" level, where the habit is some function of lagged and (possibly)...

In this paper, we propose a method of analyzing time series in the spatial domain. The analysis is based on the inference on the local time and its expectation. Both for the stationary and nonstationary time series, the spatial distributions are provided by the local time, and some of their...

This paper proposes a test for Lorenz dominance. Given independent samples of income or other welfare related variable, we propose a test of the null hypothesis that the Lorenz curve for one population is dominated by the Lorenz curve for a second population. The test statistic is based on the...

Not all firms contributed to Australia’s impressive productivity growth in the 1990s. Some performed better than others, and entrants arrived even as incumbents exited. If firms make decisions on input demand and liquidation based on their productivity, the latter known to them...