Summary Measuring globalization requires a Standard of Perfect International Integration as a benchmark that a single world space would reach under conditions of geographic neutrality in international trade. We define this standard and present indicators for openness, connectedness and...

There is a longstanding controversy over precisely what it is that banks produce. However, there is little evidence on the sensitivity of bank cost efficiency results when different output definitions are applied. This paper does exactly that. In particular, we compare nonparametric efficiency...

Over the last few years, many studies have analyzed the efficiency of local governments in different countries. An accurate definition of their output bundles—i.e., the services and facilities they provide to their constituencies—is essential to this research. However, several difficulties...

The aim of this article is to develop new international banking integration indicators together with their components: openness and regularity (balance) of the bilateral bank flows. We define the Standard of Perfect Banking Integration (SPBI), which characterizes the scenario attainable when...

While the beneficial effects of social trust on economic performance have been largely recognized, we analyze whether these effects can be generalized for economies at different stages of economic development. Contrary to previous studies on this issue based on average effects (mostly...

We analyze the performance persistence of Islamic and Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) mutual funds. We adopt a multi-stage strategy in which, in the first stage, partial frontiers’ approaches are considered to measure the performance of the different funds in the sample. In the second...