We examine the impact of board size on firm performance for a large sample of 2,746 UK listed firms over 1981-2002. The UK provides an interesting institutional setting, because UK boards play a weak monitoring role and therefore any negative effect of large board size is likely to reflect the malfunction of the board’s advisory rather than monitoring role. We find that board size has a strong ...

The paper studies the factors associated with the emergence of systemic banking crises in a sample of developed and developing countries in 1981-94 using a multivariate logit econometric model. The results show that a weak macroeconomic environment with low growth and high inflation makes crises more likely; high real interest rates have also contributed to banking sector fragility, and so does...

The paper provides an overview of current situation of the global pharmaceutical industry, with focus placed on the EU pharmaceutical market, including also the Romanian pharmaceutical market evolution synthetized into a SWOT analysis. As main goal the paper identifies several financial performance influence factors at the level of a number of companies from pharmaceutical sector, in order to g...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the existence of economies of scale and other economic parameters influencing the rate of return of the domestic solid waste collection process. To this end, the case of the Attica region in Greece, which includes equal amounts of urban and rural areas, is considered. The investigating approach is performed via the transcendental logarithmic cost func...

This paper presents the results of the first empirical investigation of the effect of information and communication technologies (ICT) investment on business performance in Greece. It investigates the effect of both ‘hard’ ICT investment (in ICT hardware, software and networks) and ‘soft’ ICT investment (in ICT human resources, skills and organization) on firm output. It is based on data from b...

Empirical research often requires a method how to convert a deterministic economic theory into an econometric model. A popular method is to add a random error term on the utility scale. This method, however, violates stochastic dominance. A modification of this method is proposed to avoid violations of dominance. The modified model compares favorably to other existing models in terms of goodnes...

Employing LL iobbDouglas specification for the production function and a modified iinear expenditure system, the paper presents an econometric model of household production, consumption and labor supply behaviour for a semi-commercial farm with a competitive labor market. The model, estimated from p.l,-iary, cross-sectional, Malaysian data, is used :o analyse the impact of migration, output pri...

a r t i c l e i n f o Higher-order spatial econometric models that include more than one weights matrix have seen increasing use in the spatial econometrics literature. There are two distinct issues related to the specification of these extended models. The first issue is what form the higher-order spatial econometric model takes, i.e. higher-order polynomials in the spatial weights matrices vs...

Institutional aspects of economic growth are critically reviewed with emphasis on the fiscal crisis facing the European Union (EU). In particular the importance of public debt, economic governance, and industrial competition are assessed, as well as the effectiveness of econometric models in forecasting economic growth. Likewise, the debate on whether political institutions cause economic growt...

This contribution is deliberately application-oriented. Conversely, the considered application introduces new circumstances and helpful designs for the graph techniques and interpretations. This study seeks to improve the knowledge of the the cyclical structure of macro-econometric models. The retained application is a recent academic model from Fair ’94 for the United States. This empirical ec...