From a model of imperfect competition among banking firms, this study derives an analytical expression that allows empirical quantification of the welfare loss associated with imperfect competition. Its application to the specific case of the European banking system shows that in spite of the...

This study analyses the cost and profit efficiency of a sample of 14 countries of the European Union, as well as Japan and the USA. The results obtained show that since the start of the 1990s increasing competition has led to gains in profit efficiency in the USA and Europe but not so in the...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of the process of progressive economic integration among the countries of Europe on their economic evolution, paying special attention to gains in efficiency and productivity. We use a nonparametric frontier technique together with the construction...

The effect of human capital is difficult to estimate in cross-country analysis due to measurement errors in schooling data. Using data for OECD countries over the period 1960-1990, the reliability of the widely used Barro and Lee's data set and also the new De la Fuente and Domenech's data set...

This paper analyses a simple and direct way to break down the convergence for labour productivity into contributions from different sources by running separate convergence regressions of the contribution to growth of each factor on the initial labour productivity level. This is because the total...