This paper proposes a simple model that formalizes a variant of Ohanian's (2001) conjecture explaining the productivity declines observed in the Great Depression. If a large payment shock like an asset-price collapse renders many firms insolvent, other economic agents become exposed to a higher risk of not being paid (payment uncertainty). The payment uncertainty causes endogenous disruptions o...

This paper seeks to investigate operating efficiency of the South Eastern European banking sector, an emerging region that has rarely been investigated, over the period 1998-2003 and to examine the relationship between operating costs and various banks’ characteristics. We compile the variables of our model using accounting data. Subsequently, we investigate banking production costs across seve...

This paper analyzes the productivity performance of Chinese manufacturing firms from 1995 to 2003 by using a large-scale firm-level dataset from the National Bureau of Statistics, Peoples Republic of China. Over this period, a large number of firms were converted to stock holding companies, and an increasing presence of foreign-owned companies further accelerated structural changes in Chinese i...

This paper presents a new approach for quantifying bank’s management quality, using a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model that combines multiple inputs and outputs to compute a scalar measure of efficiency. This measure will seek to capture a fundamental and crucial element of a bank’s success, which is its management efficiency. The results show that, on average, differences in management qu...

Taking into account that within the government sector all tax payments cancel out, a public enterprise in an economy with distortionary wage taxation will be more labor intensive than a private firm. However, an unequal tax treatment of public and private sectors distorts away the economy from production efficiency. In a general equilibrium model, incurring this inefficiency is worthwhile from ...

In this paper we analyze the economic effects of implementing EPA’s newly proposed regulations for carbon dioxide (CO2) on existing U.S. coal-fired power plants using nonparametric methods on a sample of 144 electricity generating units. Moreover, we develop an approach for evaluating the economic gains from averaging emission intensities among the utilities’ generating units, compared to imple...

The Return to the Firm Investment in Human Capital In this paper we estimate the rate of return to firm investments in human capital in the form of formal job training. We use a panel of large firms with unusually detailed information on the duration of training, the direct costs of training, and several firm characteristics such as their output, workforce characteristics and capital stock. Our...

This paper investigates why multinational ownership is found to increase the probability that a plant will exit. It does so by using Japanese plant data linked to firm data. Plants belonging to a multinational are 9 percentage points more likely to exit when plant, firm and industry characteristics are conditioned on. We find that the “footloose” effect is attributable to multinationals closing...

A startling fact of firm level productivity analysis is the large and persistent differences in both labour productivity and total factor productivity (TFP) between firms in narrowly defined sectoral classes. The competitiveness of an industry is potentially an important factor explaining this productivity dispersion. The degree of competition has also implications for the measurement of TFP at...

This paper examines the impact of being an innovator on firm productivity in Taiwan. Using a panel of 48794 firms observed over the 1997-2003 period, and distributed across 23 industries, we compute TFP by estimating Translog production functions with conventional K, L, E, M inputs. We evaluate the impact of being an innovator on TFP using propensity score matching. The rationale is that, over ...