This paper investigates the impact of specific modes of entry of foreign banks, i.e.greenfield investment versus merger and acquisition, on bank performance in threetransition economies – the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. We use stochasticfrontier analysis to model and measure the cost...

I argue that progress in understanding economic development (as in other branches of economics)must come from the investigation of mechanisms; the associated empirical analysis can usefully employa wide range of experimental and non-experimental methods. I discuss three different areas of...

This paper analyzes the evolution in bank performance following the removal of legalrestrictions on the entry of foreign banks in three transition economies: the Czech Republic,Hungary, and Poland. Two modes of foreign bank entry are considered: entry by Greenfieldinvestments, and by foreign...

This paper uses dimension asymptotics to study why overfit linear regression models shouldbe compared out-of-sample; we let the number of predictors used by the larger model increasewith the number of observations so that their ratio remains uniformly positive. Under this limittheory, the naive...

The objective of this paper is to extend the results on Pseudo Maximum Likelihood(PML) theory derived in Gourieroux, Monfort, and Trognon (GMT)(1984) to a situation where the rst four conditional moments are specied.Such an extension is relevant in light of pervasive evidence that conditional...

The paper analysis rental contracts in a two-period model of thehousing market with uncertain 'outside option', accounting for non-contractible mobility-cost and consumption indivisibilities. The mainndings are: (i) Bilaterally ecient contracts set rents which are lessvolatile than market rents...

The California Statistical Abstract is a publication that provides a wide-range of statistics about California.

I analyze empirically the effects of both urban and industrial agglomeration on men’s andwomen’s search behavior and on the efficiency of matching. The analysis is based on the ItalianLabor Force Survey micro-data, which covers 520 randomly drawn Local Labor Market Areas(66 per cent of the...

Both educational attainment and school quality are typically lower indisadvantaged areas than others and much recent policy attention has beenfocused on each. This paper looks at the quality problem, exploring therelationships between disadvantaged contexts, what schools do, and the qualityof...

Area-based programmes have long been a feature of urban policy in the UK.One rationale is that they are an effective means to target poor people. Areadeprivation indices are used to identify areas for targeting. This paper reviewsthe different results produced by these indices. It then examines...