This paper investigates the influence of environmental variables on the cost efficiency of the UK and Italian investment firms over the period 1995-1998, by employing four different specifications of the stochastic frontier methodology using a translog cost function in order to measure...

The efficiency of European investment firms' industries addresses the differentiation issue, which is investigated connecting an institutional perspective to microeconomic productivity literature. The effort is to combine macro- and micro-perspectives in the empirical analysis of a cross-country...

During the crisis the financial system experienced a concentration process driven by new M&A released by both big and medium banks. The article evaluates the role of banking features and regulatory framework in explaining the probability to be a target firm in a domestic or cross border M&A....

This paper investigates the role of off-balance sheet securitization on US bank leverage pro-cyclicality. Effective leverage (taking into account off-balance sheet securitization) is especially relevant for the US, where GAAP accounting rules for securitization allowed until 2009 a...