This paper examines the properties of the X-inefficiencies in U.S. bank holding companies derived from both stochastic and linear programming frontiers. This examination allows the robustness of results across methods to be compared. While we find that calculated programming inefficiency scores...

In the home-care services industry, caregivers drive to visit patients scattered in a district and deliver various care services at the patient's home. We use a unique data set, with a standard panel structure, recording the hours of service and the exact number of miles traveled by each...

This paper studies the bilateral drivers of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between European banks. Two findings document that banks use M&A as a device to leverage their expertise rather than to diversify. (i) Following the literature on matrimonial matching by using a binary logit model, the...

We collect data on the size distribution of all U.S. corporate businesses for 100 years. We document that corporate concentration (e.g., asset share or sales share of the top 1%) has increased persistently over the past century. Rising concentration was stronger in manufacturing and mining...

This paper overviews theoretical and empirical contributions that study political borders from an economic perspective. It reviews theories of the number and size of nations focused on the trade-off between economies of scale in public-good provision and heterogeneity of preferences over public...

One of the key questions in the study of regulation is whether the costs of regulatory compliance fall homogeneously on all businesses or whether certain firms, for instance small ones, are especially penalized. We quantify firms' compliance costs in terms of their labor spending to adhere to...

The Philippines' Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA) identifies one of the modernization objectives as "to encourage horizontal and vertical integration, consolidation, and expansion of agriculture and fisheries activities, group functions and other services through the...

We analyze the dynamics of a game of sequential bidding in the presence of stochastic scale effects in the form of stochastic economies or diseconomies of scale. We show that economies give rise to declining expected equilibrium prices, whereas the converse is not generally true. Moreover,...

This paper considers the technical aspects and the consequences, in terms of simulation results and policy assessment, of introducing imperfect competition in a CGE model. The modifications to the standard CGE framework needed to model imperfect competition in some industries are briefly...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the optimal scale of local jurisdictions (cantons) in Switzerland applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to the years 2000 to 2004. Aggregate output performance indicators for four local government activities (administration, education, health, and...