Firms are increasingly implementing electronic distribution strategies to augment existing physical infrastructure for product and service delivery. However, to date there has been little systematic study on how these distribution channels affect customer profitability. In this study, we explore...

We study the employee staffing problem in a service organization that uses employee service capacities to meet random, non-stationary service requirements. The employees experience learning and turnover on the job, and we develop a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model that explicitly represents...

We study the dynamics of market entry following mergers and acquisitions (M&As), and the behavior of recent entrants in supplying output that might be withdrawn by the consolidating firms. The data, drawn from the banking industry, suggest that M&As are associated with subsequent increases in...

This study documents high-frequency (daily) mutual fund return autocorrelations and examines the causes and consequences. We assert the cause to be nonsynchronous trading in the underlying assets of the fund, which presents investors with an option to (indirectly) trade those assets at stale...

In December 1992, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) adopted a life-health insurer risk-based capital (RBC) formula and model law that became effective with the 1993 annual statement filed in March 1994.<p> <p>In principle, well-designed RBC requirements can help achieve an...</p></p>

We provide evidence on the costs and profitability of relationship lending by banks. We derive bank-specific measures of loan rate smoothing for small business borrowers in response to exogenous shocks to their credit risk and to interest rates, and then estimate cost and profit functions to...

We provide a framework for evaluating and improving multivariate density forecasts. Among other things, the multivariate framework lets us evaluate the adequacy of density forecasts involving cross-variable interactions, such as time-varying conditional correlations. We also provide conditions...

The purpose of this paper is to contribute further evidence on bank efficiency by defining alternative measures of costs when estimating efficiency and competitive viability by linking the results of efficiency estimates to market returns of financial institutions. Given a series of functions...

This paper surveys 130 studies that apply frontier efficiency analysis to financial institutions in 21 countries. The primary goals are to summarize and critically review empirical estimates of financial institution efficiency and to attempt to arrive at a consensus view. We find that the...