On the first of January 1993, the Second Banking Directive (1989) of the European Union and a number of the other EU Directives (1) related to the financial service industry were implemented. This heralded a new episode of deregulation, standardised minimum capital requirements and changes in...

This paper investigates the cost efficiency of 1974 credit institutions across 15 European countries over the five-year period following the implementation of the Second Banking Directive in 1993. The Recursive Thick Frontier Approach is employed to estimate a Augmented Cobb-Douglas cost...

The traditional econometric techniques for frontier models, namely the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA), the Thick Frontier Approach (TFA) and the Distribution Free Approach (DFA) have in common that they depend on a priori assumptions that are, whether feasible or not, difficult to test. This...

We propose a quantification of the p-p plot that assigns equal weight to all distances between the respective distributions: the surface between the p-p plot and the diagonal. This surface is labelled the Harmonic Weighted Mass (HWM) index. We introduce the diagonal-deviation (d-d) plot that...

P-p plots contain all the information that is needed for scale-invariant comparisons. Indeed, Empirical Distribution Function (EDF) tests translate sample p-p plots into a single number. In this paper we characterize the set of all distinct p-p plots for two balanced sample of size n absent...

This overview discusses some key findings of the papers presented at the conference and draws some policy conclusions from them in the context of the broader literature. The papers and the wider academic discussion are sorted into three areas. First, how do the economics of infrastructure...

Combining in-house research and work by leading academics, this report assesses how the crisis has impacted investment across the non-financial sector, in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in infrastructure, and in R&D and innovation. It explains why and where investment has declined,...

The precarious employment situation in the EU has given rise to public policies that aim at giving small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) better access to finance. SMEs may face difficulties due to information problems and other inefficiencies in loan markets. However, the European evidence...