In recent years banks have had to operate in an increasingly competitive environment. How banks will be affected by the increased competitive pressures depends in part on how efficiently they are run.<p> <p> This paper uses the stochastic econometric cost frontier approach to study efficiency at banks...</p></p>

There are many instances where financial claims trade at prices set by intermediaries. Pricing by an intermediary introduces the potential for economic distortions from innumerable sources. As one example, we show that nonsynchronous-trading generates predictable, readily exploitable, changes in...

The authors study the effects of regulatory oversight on internal and external mechanisms to change corporate control by examining all thrifts that were publicly traded in 1990 for significant influences on whether these thrifts continued as public concerns, were acquired or were censured by the...

Since 1995 two Spanish banks -- Banco Santander Central Hispano and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya -- have become the largest foreign banks in retail banking in Latin America. This recent development merits careful analysis because foreign direct investment is rare in retail banking. We find that the...

The objective is to compare the effectiveness of financial markets and financial intermediaries in financing new industries and technologies in the presence of diversity of opinion. In markets, investors become informed about the details of the new industry or technology and make their own...

The purpose of this paper is to address two issues. It defines the appropriate role played by institutions in the financial sector and focuses on the role of risk management in firms that use their own balance sheets to provide financial products. A key objective is to explain when risks are...

This paper examines the role played by derivatives in determining the interest rate sensitivity of bank holding companies' (BHCs') common stock, controlling for the influence of on-balance sheet activities and other bank-specific characteristics. The major result of the analysis suggests that...