The roughly 9.5 percent of all U.S. families that are without some type of transaction account (unbanked) are disproportionately represented by minorities. The unbanked often must rely on alternative ways to carry out basic financial transactions such as cashing payroll checks and paying bills....

With U.S. multinational enterprises playing increasingly important roles in the global economy, it is important to understand the efficiency of their capital budgeting decisions. We examine an unbalanced panel of 332 U.S. firms from 1992-2000. Using the deviation of a firm's estimated marginal...

This paper examines the effectiveness of multinational enterprises capital budgeting decisions as compared to the decisions of purely domestic enterprises. This is an important question because of multinationals role in allocating capital globally. Answering this question may also shed light on...

The productive efficiency of a firm can be seen as composed of two parts, one persistent and one transient. The received empirical literature on the measurement of productive efficiency has paid relatively little attention to the difference between these two components. Ahn, Good and Sickles...

The persistence of increasingly high government subsidies in Switzerland’s railroads has led the federal and cantonal authorities to discussing the possibility of high-powered incentive contracts such as those based on cost efficiency benchmarking. Railways are however, characterized by a high...

This paper explores the application of several panel data models in measuring productive efficiency of the electricity distribution sector. Stochastic Frontier Analysis has been used to estimate the cost-efficiency of 59 distribution utilities operating over a nine-year period in Switzerland....