Microcredit, being the most unique form of antipoverty intervention in terms of its methodology and outreach, has generated considerable amount of disagreements in recent times. While there may be more serious disagreements surrounding microcredit, this article addresses whether or not...

This study aims to assess the microfinance institutions’ (MFIs’) efficiency in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) after the reforms that were undertaken in the industry. Given the complementary role between MFIs and banks (where MFIs reach the population that the banks...

This study employs various bootstrapped Malmquist indices and efficiency scores to investigate the effects of government regulation on the performance of the Iranian banking industry over the period 2003-2008. An alternative decomposition of the Malmquist index, introduced by Simar and Wilson...

This study illustrates how the recent developments in efficiency analysis and statistical inference can be applied when evaluating banks’ performance issues from a potential merger. By using a sample of 29 Greek commercial banks the paper provides a six step procedure in order to evaluate...

This study examines the efficiency of banking systems in seventeen OECD countries over the period 1999-2009. For the purpose of our analysis we introduce a window-based version of two relational two-stage DEA models. Furthermore, we apply different versions of the additive and the multiplicative...

Recent financial crises and especially large corporate bankruptcies, have led bank managements and financial authorities to follow and monitor both financial and real sector risks, and to focus on firm failures. Bank of International Settlements, has therefore, taken the decision to include the...

This paper explores the impact of M&A on technical efficiency of Indian commercial banks during the second decade of reforms. We use DEA to compute the relative technical efficiency of banks that participated in M&A activities. The technical efficiency is computed under both 'common' and...

The paper looks at the impact of the exchange rate regime and the household’s choice of debt. One of the characteristics of economic transition in eastern European countries was an increase in overall debt holding. Standard economic theory assumes the relationship S=I. According to this...

This double-issue contains 11 papers invited for the first special issue on “Computational methods for Russian economic and financial modelling”. It was an attempt to explore and bring together practical, state-of-the-art applications of computational techniques with a particular focus on...