The Argentine banking industry has experienced increasing consolidation during the last decade. On the one hand, it can be argued that this has resulted from cost economies, perhaps associated with technical change. But on the other, it can also be argued that increased concentration in this...

The recent Green Paper, A Review of Monopolies and Mergers Policy : A Consultative Document (1978), after presenting the theoretical arguments and the empirical evidence relating to monopoly and merger, comes to the conclusion that only minor adjustments in policy are required. On mergers it...

The paper argues that the incidence of moral hazard played a significant role in the 2007/2008 credit crunch. In particular, bank traders subjected to asymmetric compensation structures have an incentive to take excessive risks even when the bank's shareholders would prefer prudent investment....

We extend the analysis of Dutta, Jackson and Le Breton (Econometrica 2001) on strategic candidacy to probabilistic environments. For each configuration of the agenda and each profile of voters' preferences over running candidates a probabilistic voting procudure selects a lottery on the set of...

Retail chains essentially practice one of two broad strategies in setting prices across their stores. The more straightforward is to set a chain- or country- wide price. Alternatively, managers of retail chains may customize prices to the store level according to local demand and competitive...

In surveys of well-being, countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands emerge as particularly happy while nations like Germany and Italy report lower levels of happiness. But are these kinds of findings credible? This paper provides some evidence that the answer is yes. Using data on 16...

This paper extends the cross-sectionally augmented IPS (CIPS) test of Pesaran (2006) to a three-dimensional (3D) panel. This 3D-CIPS test is correctly sized in the presence of cross-sectional dependency. Comparing its power performance to that of a bootstrapped IPS (BIPS) test, we find that the...

In a case study of six East Asian economies, we use dynamic factor analysis to estimate a regional component of the exchange market pressure index (EMPI) as a measure of regional financial stress. The extent to which this indicator is explained by regional economic and financial factors is...