In many industries, competition is far from perfect and managerial efficiency (or a fixed cost) varies among firms. However, traditional measurement of technological progress assumes perfect competition and no fixed cost. This paper incorporates these two factors in the technological-progress...

Under what conditions does cost-of-service regulation lead firms to distort costs? This paper analyzes changes in fuel procurement practices by coal- and natural gas-fired electricity generating plants in the United States following state-level legislation that ended cost-of-service regulation...

Although the allocative efficiency benefits of competition are a tenet of microeconomic theory, the relation between competition and technical efficiency is less well understood. Neoclassical models of profit-maximization subsume static cost-minimizing behavior regardless of market...

In 2008-2009, the US and the UK undertook quantitative easing to drive interest rates to near zero to combat the Global Financial Crisis, and China increased the growth rate of base money slightly. The resulting credit growth was very slight in US and UK but over 100% in China. The US and UK...

In the wake of the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008, there has been extensive commentary and regulatory focus on the 'Too Big to Fail' issue. In this paper, we survey the proposed solutions and regulatory initiatives that have been undertaken. We conduct a longitudinal analysis of...

In the United States and the European Union (EU), political incentives to oppose cross-border banking have been strong in spite of the measurable benefits to the real economy from breaking down geographic barriers. Even a federal-level supervisor and safety net are not by themselves sufficient...

Voters punish incumbent Presidential candidates for contractions in the local (county-level) supply of mortgage credit during market-wide contractions of credit, but they do not reward them for expansions in mortgage credit supply in boom times. Our primary focus is the Presidential election of...

Since the financial crisis in 2007, banks have been hit by legal settlements from incidents related to the crisis. Over time, the frequency and the magnitude of these fines has only increased, thereby, implicating that financial misconduct is not an idiosyncratic risk that can be ‘spot...

The cost to merchants of taking payment on debit cards declined by more than $7 billion annually as a result of the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, while the effective cost to issuers of providing debit card services to consumers...

The US banking industry offers a unique, natural and fertile environment to study geography's effects on banks' behavior and performance. The literature on banks' operating performance, while extensive, says little about the influence of spatial interactions on banks' performance. We compute and...