In this ground-breaking analysis of the world's first private banks, Edward Cohen convincingly demonstrates the existence and functioning of a market economy in ancient Athens while revising our understanding of the society itself. Challenging the "primitivistic" view, in which bankers are...

This study examines the efficiency performance of the minority-owned banks (MOBS) as multiproduct firms relative to that of the nonminority banks (NMOBs) using a highly flexible nonparametric approach. Since MOBS and NMOBs employ distinct technologies the efficiency indices for the two groups...