The labour productivity differentials between manufacturing firms in Ghana and South Korea exceed those implied by macro analysis. Median value-added per employee is nearly 40 times higher in South Korea than Ghana. The most important single factor in explaining this difference is the Mincerian return to skills which differ by a factor of three between Ghana and South Korea. There is no signifi...

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...

The F1 along with parents of a 4 x 6 line x tester crosses in safflower were studied and seven parameters, i.e., D 2 7 based on 7 characters and D24 based on yield and its 3 direct componenets and mid parent value (MP-Y), F1 mean (F1-Y), relative heterosis (RH-Y), biparental average GCA (MPGCA-Y) and SCA effect (SCA-Y) for yield were estimated. Twenty four selected crosses were studied for segr...

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...

Article history: Received 18 September 2014 Received in revised form 24 September 2014 Accepted 15 October 2014 Available online 20 October 2014 This paper investigates product-specific scale economies of banks with respect to off-balance sheet operations. The cost benefits from the non-separability of outputs available to banks that imply the role of OBS activities on bank scale economies are ...

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...