We examine the intertemporal relation between government revenue and expenditure in the UK during 1750 to 2004. We pay particular attention to long run trends by applying a battery of unit root and cointegration techniques to the data, and we use a modified Granger causality test on data spans...

In an empirical contribution to the literature of foreign aid, we estimate the impact of foreign aid on democracy in a panel of 93 developing economies during 1971-2010. We find that foreign aid promotes democracy, with the result robust to different estimation methodologies and control...

In this article, we report results from several traditional and more recently developed unit root and cointegration tests, allowing for structural breaks, which indicate that UK government revenue and spending during 1750-2004 were I(1) series and cointegrated, and that the UK public finances...

A common criticism of foreign aid is that it reduces domestic tax effort. Empirical research on the issue has been hampered by the failure to tackle endogeneity issues effectively. We use measures of geographical and cultural distance to donor countries as instrumental variables to uncover the...

This article examines the issue of long-run fiscal sustainability in South Africa by applying a battery of recently developed unit root and cointegration tests to real revenue and spending data for the period 1895 to 2005. The results provide evidence that, allowing for structural breaks, South...

This article investigates the effects of competition on bank risk taking behaviour in four South East Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam). Our main finding is that competition does not increase bank risk-taking behaviour and the results appear robust to different model...

This study investigates the main determinants of Italian banks' cost efficiency over the period 1993-1996, by employing a Fourier-flexible stochastic cost frontier in order to measure X-efficiencies and economies of scale. Quality and riskiness of bank outputs are explicitly accounted for in the...

This paper investigates whether there has been an improvement in and convergence of productive efficiency across European banking markets since the creation of the Single Internal Market. Using efficiency measures derived from DEA estimation, the determinants of European bank efficiency are...

The efficiency and productivity in the Italian factoring industry between 1993 and 1997 is investigated using DEA. The factoring industry is an important part of many financial systems and it has established itself as a major source of finance and credit management for a growing number of...