The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...

Total factor productivity (TFP) growth allows for additional health care services under restricted resources. We examine whether hospital policy can stimulate hospital TFP growth. We exploit variation across German federal states in the period 1993 to 2013. State governments decide on hospital...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the interest margin of German banks over the period 1995–2007, explicitly addressing differences among different bank groups. We use three empirical models to focus on the following aspects: the time evolution of the interest margin, the average...

Die Ausstattung der Hochschulen in Sachsen ist gut, so die gefühlte Wahrnehmung der breiten Öffentlichkeit. Dieses Bauchgefühl lässt sich bei einem ersten Blick zunächst auch mit einer eindrucksvollen Zahl belegen: gemessen an der Wirtschaftskraft lag die Ausstattung der sächsischen...

We investigate the consistency of efficiency scores derived with two competing frontier methods in the financial economics literature: Stochastic Frontier and Data Envelopment Analysis. We sample 34,192 observations for all German universal banks and analyze whether efficiency measures yield...

The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...