Traditional efficiency measures neglect bank risk and, even when risk is accounted for, do not differentiate between the portion subject to managerial control (¿internal¿) versus the portion that is exogenous and is part of a changing environment (¿external¿). This paper proposes a new...

Increased competition and the attempts of European banks to increase their presence in other markets may have affected the efficiency and credit risk. The first of this aspects is based on the incentive to the banks to reduce cost in order to gain in competitiveness. The second is associated to...

In this paper we analyze firms' ability to tacitly collude on pricesin an infinitely repeated duopoly game of vertical productdifferentiation. We show that firms collude if and only if their discountfactor is high enough, i.e. if they value future profits sufficiently. We alsoshow that a lower...

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 study analyses the evolution of market power in the banking sectors of the European Union based on the estimation of Lerner indices. Using a panel of 18,810 observations of the banking industries of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom during the period 1992-99, the results...

Financial integration in Europe should affect the competition between markets and intermediaries and generate a convergence of both interest rates and margins among the different countries. This paper analyses the evolution of the convergence in interest rates and the level of competition and...

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...

Competition has long been regarded as productivity enhancing. Understanding the mechanism by which competition affects innovation and productivity is therefore an important topic for economic policy. The main contribution of this paper is to disentangle the relationship between competition and...

In this paper, we show that downstream mergers increase the incentives of an up-stream firm to invest in cost-reducing R&D. The upstream firm revenues increase with industry profits, which in turn increase with concentration downstream and this explains the positive link between concentration...

In the context of the recent electricity market reforms in Europe and the US, we evaluate the performance of the Spanish pool. Our method is not based on price-cost estimates but rather on the different behavior of operators with higher market power as compared to the behavior of more...