Credit risk is crucial to understanding banks’ production technology and should be explicitly accounted for when modeling the latter. The banking literature has largely accounted for risk by using ex-post realizations of banks’ uncertain outputs and the variables intended to capture risk....

This paper presents new nonparametric measures of scale economies and TFP growth for U.S. banks. Unlike previous studies that use fully nonparametric models, our approach controls for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity among banks in estimating returns to scale, TFP growth and its...

This paper raises concerns about the econometric approach used in the literature to estimate credit unions’ production technologies. We show that the existing studies did not recognize heterogeneity amongst credit unions’ technologies as captured by (endogenously selected) differing output...

This paper presents new evidence regarding the relation between profit, revenue, and cost efficiencies of U.S. commercial banks. Building on the widely used nonstandard profit function (NSPF) approach, we show (i) why estimation of NSPF would be wrong and (ii) how revenue and cost efficiencies...

This paper is intended to provide an updated discussion on a series of issues that the relevant literature suggests to be crucial in dealing with the challenges a middle income country may encounter in its attempts to further catch-up a higher income status. In particular, the conventional...

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the implications that complementary assets needed for the formation of start-ups -proxied by the ease of access to financial resources- have on the innovative efforts of incumbent firms. In particular, we develop a theoretical model,...

The hypothesis underlined in this paper is that apart from infant mortality there is another relevant phenomenon taking place within new-born Small Business Enterprises (SBEs) in the period immediately after entry; namely that the smaller ones among them, having entered with a marked sub-optimal...