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...

This paper makes two important contributions to the literature on prediction intervals for firm specific inefficiency estimates in cross sectional SFA models. Firstly, the existing intervals in the literature do not correspond to the minimum width intervals and in this paper we discuss how to...

This paper highlights the importance of modelling the interaction between returns to scale/density and heterogeneity of services when evaluating optimal size and structure of passenger rail operations. We propose and estimate a hedonic cost function which allows us to incorporate measures of...

In this paper we consider the sensitivity of functional form in the popular panel data stochastic frontier model proposed by Battese and Battese and Coelli (BC, 1992). We demonstrate that adopting the (t−T) efficiency functional form used by BC can, in a model which allows for firm specific...

Economic theory advocates marginal cost pricing for efficient utilisation of transport infrastructure. A growing body of literature has emerged on the issue of rail marginal infrastructure wear and tear costs, but the majority of the work is focused on costs for infrastructure maintenance....

This paper applies econometric methods to estimate marginal track maintenance cost in Britain - for the first time. The British case is the most radical example of rail reform in the world, and the 2005 Railway Act has resulted in a new and unique regulatory process for determining funding and...