This paper investigates the size-efficiency relation of European cooperative banks during the 2006-2015 period. We employ the Stochastic Frontier Analysis in order to obtain inefficiency estimates and its determinants on the set of 183 cooperative banks from 12 European countries. This work...

When benchmarking production units by non-parametric methods like data envelopment analysis (DEA), an assumption has to be made about the returns to scale of the underlying technology. Moreover, it is often also relevant to compare the frontiers across samples of producers. Until now, no exact...

This paper argues that the conventional definition of the elasticity of complementarity is not well suited to deal with the case of increasing returns. It proposes a slightly different formula, that uses a distance function formulation instead of a production function. The proposed definition...

Combining micro and macro data, we construct demand-side shocks, which we take to be exogenous for individual firms. We estimate a reduced-form model to describe how firms adjust their production, employment, capital stock, and inventories in response to such shocks. Then, we chose the...