The objective of this study is to analyze the macroeconomic performance of 16 Ibero- American countries over the period 1980- 199 1. Macroeconomic performance is defined as the ability of a country's macroeconomic managers to provide four welfare-enhancing economic services to their citizens: a...

This paper shows the importance of the composition of production -productive specialization- and sector inefficiencies when evaluating efficiency in aggregate production. For this purpose, a new approach is proposed for obtaining efficiency scores which enables two components to be...

The analysis of bank accounting ratios as indicators of competitiveness has been complemented and occasionally revised by the increasing use of more sophisticated indices ofefficiency. In recent years, over a hundred studies have analysed the efficiency of financial institutions, concentrating...

In this paper we extend the efficiency cross-country comparisons to ten European countries in order to know how different or similar current banking performances are. We start with two types of comparisons. First of all, we evaluate the average technical efficiency of each country by means of a...

Let µ be a rational distribution over a finite alphabet, and ( ) be a n-periodic sequences which first n elements are drawn i.i.d. according to µ. We consider automata of bounded size that input and output at stage t. We prove the existence of a constant C such that, whenever , with...

This paper presents a model of network formation with costly links. We endogenize the amount of cost born by each player involved in a bilateral link by considering that these shares result from bargaining. We analyze this feature in a context of coordination games. We show that, if the cost of...

The objective of this paper is to estimate technical efficiency in retailing; and the influence of inventory investment, wage levels, and firm age on this efficiency. We use the output supermarket chains¿ sales volume, calculated isolating the retailer price effect on its sales revenue. This...

This paper analyses the efficiency and productivity growth experienced by the Spanish Banking System over the 1986-92 period. The analysis uses a non parametric approach together with the Malmquist index to decompose the productivity growth into changes in efficiency (catching-up) and...

This paper presents a model in which players interact via the formation of costly links and the benefits of bilateral interactions are determined by a coordination game. A novel contribution of this paper is that the fraction of the cost borne by each player involved in a bilateral link is not...