"This paper examines the technical efficiency of U.S. Federal reserve check processing offices over 1980-2003. We use new unconditional quantile estimator of efficiency that avoids some drawbacks of other recently proposed estimators. The new estimator is fully non-parametric, robust with...

"State per capita incomes became more disperse during the contraction phase of the Great Depression, and less disperse during the recovery phase. We investigate the effects of geography, industry structure, bank failures and fiscal policies on state income growth during each phase. We find that...

This paper investigates how well regulator examinations predict bank failures, and how best to incorporate examination information into an econometric model of time-to-failure. We estimate proportional hazard models with time-varying covariates and find that examiner ratings help explain the...

Numerous studies have found that banks exhaust scale economies at low levels of output, but most are based on the estimation of parametric cost functions which misrepresent bank cost. Here we avoid specification error by using nonparametric kernal regression techniques. We modify measures of...

This paper uses micro-level historical data to examine the causes of bank failure. For state charactered Kansas banks during 19 10-28, time-to-failure is explicitly modeled using a proportional hazards framework. In addition to standard financial ratios, this study includes membership in the...