This paper discusses the relationship between bank size and risk-takingunder Pillar I of the New Basel Capital Accord.

The purpose of this study is to extend the current understanding of business divestiture by investigating its potential for triggering strategic reorientation. A divestiture involving strategic reorientation is here denoted as a strategic business exit, otherwise it is a status...

Advanced market economies are characterized by a continuous process of creativedestruction. Market forces and technological developments play a major role in shaping thisprocess, but institutional and policy settings also influence firms´ decision to enter, to expandif successful and to exit if...

It is widely recognized that "market failure" prevents efficient risksharing in natural disaster insurance. As a consequence, many countriesadopted institutional frameworks presenting public sector participation,often praised as public-private partnerships. We define risk selection asa situation...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview and new empirical evidence on frontier effi-ciency measurement in the insurance industry, a topic of great interest in the academic literature during the last several years. In the first step, we review 87 studies and put them into a joint...

This paper analyzes the effect of firing costs on aggregate productivity growth. For thispurpose, a model of endogenous growth through selection and imitation is developed. It isconsistent with recent evidence on firm dynamics and on the importance of reallocation forproductivity growth...

We consider the plant location decision of a multinational, which has the option to invest in a more or aless technologically advanced country. We find that in the absence of exporting by the local firms, themultinational will invest in the country lagging behind, unless the firms in that...

There have been many claims that the Internet represents a nearly frictionless market. This paper extends the empirical results on online retailing by studying prices for nearly homogenous services - holiday packages - matched across conventional and Internet channels. On first sight, lower...

Diese Arbeit analysiert die Verteilung von technischer Effizienz innerhalb von Branchen des Verarbeitenden Gewerbes. Die technische Effizienz wird als fir-menspezifischer fixer Effekt im Rahmen einer deterministischen Frontier-Pro-duktionsfunktion ermittelt. Als Grundlage hierfür dienen Angaben...

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