This paper investigates how variations in macroeconomic uncertainty distort commercial banks' allocation of loanable funds by analyzing the dispersion of banks' total loan-to-asset ratios over a quarter-century period.

We investigate the impact of debt on a panel of U.S. manufacturing firms' capital investment behavior as the underlying firm-specific and market-level uncertainty changes. Our estimates show that the influence of leverage on capital investment may be stimulating or mitigating depending on the...

We investigate the impact of measures of uncertainty on firms' capital investment behavior using a panel of U.S. firms. Increases in firm-specific and CAPM-based measures have a significant negative effect on investment spending, while market-based uncertainty has a positive impact.

The traditional approach to measuring allocative efficiency is based on input prices, which are rarely known at the firm level. This paper proposes a new approach to measure allocative efficiency which is based on the output-oriented distance to the frontier in a profit - technical efficiency...

Using micro-level panel data of about 35,000 firms from the German Cost Structure Census, we analyze the differences of technical efficiency across industries. Technical efficiency is estimated by firms' fixed effects. One striking result is that the distribution of technical efficiency across...

This paper analyzes the distribution of technical efficiency within manufacturing industries. Using a representative sample of 35,000 firms in 255 industries of the German cost structure census, technical efficiencies are estimated by applying a deterministic frontier production function with...

We introduce a new two-dimensional measure for the heterogeneity of performance within groups of economic units. This measure accounts both, for the relative performance of the single units of groups and their relative size. We demonstrate that the new measure leads to a much more differentiated...