This paper examines the production structure of Swiss banks in the period 1996-99. Using a variety of output specifications, we find evidence of large relative inefficiencies across Swiss banks. The results show the importance of accounting for the broad range of activities that universal banks...

Starting with Krugman (1980), much literature has analyzed how trade liberalization affects the economy based on the notion that trade is motivated by consumer's love of variety. In this paper, I augment these preferences by the determinants of demand for heterogeneous products. The model...

This paper starts by showing that in the European car industry, there exist cross-country taste differences along the product attribute dimension that significantly drive net trade patterns and reduce the volume of trade. Further it is shown that, after the creation of the European common...

This paper examines the effect of mergers on the performance of banks. We use a unique and exhaustive panel data set of mergers of Austrian banks covering the period from 1996 to 2002. A probit selection equation is formulated to explain the adoption of a merger strategy. We use various matching...

The evolution of higher moments of the firm size distribution so far seems to be neglected in the empirical firm growth literature. Based on GMM estimates, this paper introduces simple Wald tests to investigate whether the firm size distribution converges in both the second and third central...

This paper studies the serial autocorrelation of annual growth rates in employment for selected Austrian service industries over a 30-year period using quantile regression techniques. The autocorrelation of growth rates provides important information on firms growth processes. We find that the...

This paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the impact of acquisitions, initial public offerings and management buyouts on productivity and profitability of a large sample of Europe-based manufacturing companies covering the period from 1996 to 2005. At the center of our analysis is the...

We study the evolution and cyclical dependency of the cross sectional distribution of firm level job creation rates from 1975 to 2004 for the Austrian private sector. We find that the share of firms that o not adjust has declined over time, but that the share of entries, exits, growing and...

Recent research has led to the empirical regularity that firm growth rate distributions are heavy tailed. This finding implies that a few firms experience spectacular growth rates and decline, but that most firms have marginal growth rates. The literature on high-growth firms shows that...