Credit risk is crucial to understanding banks' production technology and should be explicitly accounted for when modeling the latter. The banking literature has largely accounted for risk by using ex-post realizations of banks' uncertain outputs and the variables intended to capture risk. This...

Under fairly general assumptions requiring neither a differentiable frontier nor a constant-returns-to-scale technology, this paper introduces a new definition of an optimal scale size based on the minimization of unit costs. The corresponding measure, average-cost efficiency, combines scale and...

This paper addresses estimation and decomposition of productivity change, which is mostly identified as technical change under constant (unitary) returns to scale (CRS). If the CRS assumption is not made, productivity change is decomposed into technical change and scale effects.Furthermore, if...

This paper provides a description of the production process by comparing different frameworks in which to analyze the relations between inputs and output. The analysis is performed on a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We employ both parametric and non-parametric analysis....

Specific innovation capabilities enable large firms to depart from constant returns to scale and benefit from significant economies of scale. These capabilities improve the quality of the labor force organization and therefore positively impact labor productivity.

We estimate a collective household model with survey data on financial satisfaction from the European Community Household Panel. Our estimates suggest that cohabitating individuals enjoy returns to scale in consumption that are towards the larger end of the range of estimates reported in the...

This paper focuses on the pattern of returns to scale and productivity growth in UK manufacturing establishments in the electronics and food industries. Our results show that foreign establishments tend to have lower returns to scale than their domestic counterparts. Moreover, foreign...

This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated,n -person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how "much" cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group...

We provide an extensive and general investigation of the effects on industry performance (profits and social welfare) of exogenously changing the number of firms in a Cournot framework. This amounts to an in-depth exploration of the well-known trade-off between competition and production...