Increased competition and the attempts of European banks to increase their presence in other markets may have affected the efficiency and credit risk. The first of this aspects is based on the incentive to the banks to reduce cost in order to gain in competitiveness. The second is associated to...

Hypothesis testing and statistical precision in the context of nonparametric efficiency and productivity measurement have been investigated since the early 1990s. Recent contributions focus on this matter through the use of resampling methods?i.e., bootstrapping techniques. However, empirical...

This study analyzes the links between efficiency and the decentralization of competencies among Spanish local governments for years 1995 and 2000. The aim is pursued by considering a two-stage activity analysis model in which the performance of eachmunicipality is first evaluated against other...

Over the last decade, the Spanish banking sector has undergone a radical structural change. The old bank statu quo has broken down due both to the impact of technical change and to a strong deregulation process, that has given way to a much freer and competitive economic environment. Similarly,...

This paper analyzes the relationship between market structure and performance within the Spanish banking industry. Three different stochastic measures of efficiency are used (based on three alternative distributional assumptions for inefficiency: half-normal, normal-truncated and exponential)....

We study a setting in which individual players choose their partners as well as a mode of behavior in 2 x 2 anti-coordination games -- games where a player's best response is to behave differently than the opponent. We characterize the nature of equilibrium networks as well as study the effects...

The aim of this study is to analyse the efficiency of companies forming collective brands in the experience goods sector. The central hypothesis is that collective brands have a positive impact on the efficiency of their member companies and that this is because collective reputation encourages...

In this work a non parametric approach is used in order to evaluate the relative efficiency of a sample of firms producers of wooden goods, in presence of non desirable outputs. As main results, we find that the consideration of several restrictions on the expansion of non desirable outputs...

Over the last few years, there has been a devolutionary tendency in many developed and developingcountries. In this article we propose a methodology to decompose whether the benefits in terms ofefficiency derived from transfers of powers from higher to municipal levels of government...

In a previous work, Forner and Marhuenda (2001) find that the contrarian strategy, thatis, the forming of a zero-investment portfolio that buys the stocks that have performed poorly inthe past (losers) and sells those that have performed well (winners), does not yield abnormallypositive returns...