This research uses an indirect methodology to examine the effects of health insurance mergers and acquisitions by analyzing the impact of insurers' scale of operations and group affiliation status on benefits, costs, and efficiency from the perspective of various stakeholders. The analysis can...

Asset pricing literature shows that higher operating leverage relates to higher expected stock returns (e.g. Novy-Marx (2011)). We show that higher OL explains higher expected stock returns only when returns to scale are high. This finding is new. When returns to scale are high, OL is positive...

This paper examines and applies the theoretical foundation of the decomposition of economic and productivity growth to the thirty provinces in China's post-reform economy. The four attributes of economic growth are input growth, adjusted scale effect, technical progress, and efficiency growth. A...

We use mergers in the global asset management industry to study the returns to scale from labor specialization. Mergers are followed by an increase in managerial turnover that assigns fund managers to more specialized tasks. This creates an incremental $54 million of value added per merger per...

German Abstract: Diese Studie untersucht die Frage nach der Überlegenheit großer gegenüber kleinen Banken, wobei im Unterschied zu bisherigen Arbeiten neben Erfolgskennzahlen explizit auch streuungsbasierte Kennzahlen für das Bankrisiko berücksichtigt wurden. Wenn gutes Management einen...

Non-parametric evaluation of returns to scale of production units in standard DEA models becomes problematic when their underlying technologies involve negative data. The methodology recently offered by Allahyar and Rostamy-Malkhalifeh (2015) (hence after called ARM model) is of some help to...

We develop a two-sector model of monopolistic competition with a differentiated intermediate good and variable elasticity of technological substitution. This setting proves to be well-suited to studying the nature and origins of external increasing returns. We disentangle two sources of scale...

Standard measures of economies of scale and scope show that size does matter for German investment management companies. The average investment management company faces an increase in costs of 0.71% for a 1% increase in assets under management. Small to mid-sized companies in our example exhibit...

This report assesses the impact of digitalisation on competition by examining the evolution of mark-ups and multifactor productivity (MFP) across firms of different sizes. It finds that size is positively related to mark-ups and that this relationship has strengthened over time. This trend has...

The paper investigates whether the poor productivity performance of the European business services industry is related to scale effects, market structure, and regulatory impacts. We apply parametric and nonparametric methods to estimate the productivity frontier and so obtain the distance of...