The unique capital structure of commercial banking - funding production with demandable debt that participates in the economy's payments system - affects various aspects of banking. It shapes commercial banks' comparative advantage in providing financial products and services to informationally...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...

We propose a new methodology to estimate the share of household income accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children). Following the principle of the Rothbarth approach, the identification of the children's share requires the observation of at least one adult-specific good. However, our...

Quality of service is of major economic significance in natural monopoly infrastructure industries and is increasingly addressed in regulatory schemes. However, this important aspect is generally not reflected in efficiency analysis of these industries. In this paper we present an efficiency...

This paper investigates the relation between agglomeration of economic activity and the pattern of specialization of countries. We develop a model encompassing a Ricardian comparative advantage, increasing returns to scale, product differentiation, monopolistic competition, trade costs, and...

Several studies have been conducted to analyze whether a regulation of the postal sector as a monopoly is actually efficient by examining its cost structure. The authors detected significant scale economies only in the delivery function and hence demonstrated a necessity for competition in the...

Our research as well as that by other authors has found scale economies at all sizes of banks and the largest scale economies at the largest banks – that is, larger banks are able to provide products at lower average cost than smaller banks. While the earlier literature found that scale...