Abstract Constant Market Share Analysis (CMSA) is a method which decomposes the variation of market shares of any trader country. The more recent version is proposed by Fagerberg and Sollie (1985) that avoids some limits deriving from previously specifications. After explicating how CMSA works,...

One learns two main lessons from studying the great quantity of banking efficiency literature. These lessons regard the heterogeneity in results and the absence of a comprehensive review aimed at understanding the reasons for this variability. Surprisingly, although this issue is well-known, it...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the efficiency of the Italian Banking System over the period 2006-2010. By applying the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA) to a panel of 700 banks, the analysis is based on the joint estimation of a cost function and an efficiency equation (Battese and...

Are Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Research & Development (R&D) inputs or efficiency determinants? This is the topic of the paper which is developed by analysing a sample of 2691 Italian manufacturing firms over the period 2007-2009. The empirical setting is based on a...

This study evaluates the cost and the profit efficiency of Italian banking sector over the period 2006-2011. Translog stochastic frontiers are used for this purpose. Following the intermediation approach, efficiency scores are computed from estimating a model with three inputs and three outputs....

The empirical literature on trade imbalances does not make currency tensions easy to understand, because tensions across traders originate from the assumption that export-price elasticity is high. This paper provides new evidence by analysing the export-behaviour of China, France, Germany,...

In this paper, we study the so-called “wrong skewness” anomaly in Stochastic Frontiers (SF), which consists in the observed difference between the expected and estimated sign of the asymmetry of the composite error. We propose a more general and flexible specification of the SF model,...

The genuine problem of governance is one that pays equal attention to both incentive and knowledge issues in private and public contexts. This work brings together Austrian, Public Choice and theory of the firm insights to address such problem. By taking into account incentives and knowledge, it...

We summarize Francis Fukuyama’s State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century (London, Profile Books, 2005)and explore the limits of its arguments. State Building is a book with a very wide scope that essentially tries to “ground” and expand the fields of political...

The article turns to classical economic insights on the division of labor and to institutional reasoning to identify some costs and benefits of Open Source Software (OSS) and proprietary software production. It suggests that, thanks to its licenses, OSS favors market expansion more than...