This study applies parametric distance functions to estimate the efficiency of foreign banks in Australia, and subsequently employs extreme bounds analysis to establish the determinants of foreign bank efficiency that are robust to model specification. The limited global advantage hypothesis of...

We analyze the stability of efficiency rankings of German universal banks between 1993 and 2004. First, we estimate traditional efficiency scores with stochastic cost and alternative profit frontier analysis. Then, we explicitly allow for different risk preferences and measure efficiency with a...

Efficiency is considered a key factor when evaluating a bank's performance. Moreover, efficiency enhancement is an explicit policy objective in the Single Market Directive of the European Commission. But efficiency improvements may come at the expense of deteriorating bank profits and excessive...

Using firm-level data from nine developing countries we demonstrate that (a) certain institutions like restrictive labour market regulations that are considered to be bad for economic growth might be beneficial for production efficiency, whereas (b) good business environment which is considered...

This paper analyzes the productivity development in the German public theater sector for the seasons 1991/1992-2005/2006. Using a stochastic distance frontier approach that allows to decompose total factor productivity change into different sources we examine (a) whether Baumol's cost-disease...

The statistical properties of the efficiency estimators based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) are largely unknown. Recent work by Simar et al. and Banker has shown the consistency of the DEA estimators under specific assumptions, and Banker proposes asymptotic tests of whether two subsamples...

This study explores the prevalence and nature of the regional divide for the Mexican manufacturing production across sub-national regions. We utilize a unique panel of municipality-level data from the manufacturing sector. An important contribution is the use of different panel methods to...