The U.S. banking industry has been characterized by intense merger activity in the absence of economies of scale and scope. We claim that the loosening of geographic constraints on U.S. banks is responsible for this consolidation process, irrespective of value-maximizing motives. We demonstrate...

We put forward a simple spatial competition model to study banks’ strategic responses to the Spanish asymmetric geographic deregulation. We find that once geographic deregulation process finishes, inter-regional mergers between the savings banks are optimal. We claim that the public good...

In this paper we extend the efficiency cross-country comparisons to ten European countries in order to know how different or similar current banking performances are. We start with two types of comparisons. First of all, we evaluate the average technical efficiency of each country by means of a...

In this paper we obtain the value that experimental subjects attach to a prisoners’ dilemma game by applying a related procedure to BDM (1964). We also obtain the value of a closely related game which does not incorporate any social dilemma. By comparing both values, we are able to classify...

In a repeated public goods setting, we explore whether individuals, acting unilaterally, will provide an effective sanctioning institution. Subjects first choose unilaterally whether they will participate in a sanctioning stage that follows a contribution stage. Only those who gave themselves...

type="main" xml:id="sjpe12037-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>This study discusses informal hiring in terms of a standard principal–agent model. We have developed an adverse selection model of the labour market where effort is not contractible and employers have the opportunity to use informal search...</p>

This study provides additional empirical evidence to the research concerning the effects of gender and age on retrospective time judgements using data obtained from a Spanish database with more than 40,000 individual observations on time estimations. Statistical analyses were performed using the...

We show that for any market-clearing price, average profits in a symmetric industry cannot exceed the individual profits from the Walrasian output. This immediately implies that a firm itself can guarantee to beat the market by producing the Walrasian output. This property clarifies and...