To what extent has input reallocation contributed to aggregate productivity growth in the banking sectors of Europe and the United States? Interestingly, under-performing banks capture market share, while more productive banks lose market share, in particular in the US. The pattern of...

In this article, we compare standard approaches used to handle losses in logarithmic profit models with a simple novel approach. We estimate translog stochastic profit frontiers, and discuss discriminatory power, rank stability and the precision of Profit Efficiency (PE) scores. Contrary to...

In this paper, we question whether there is a catch-up effect or announcement effect in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the European Union (EU) to the ten EU accession countries. We study FDI outflows from the Netherlands, a small open economy with few historical ties to Eastern Europe, and...

This paper brings to the forefront the assumptions that we make when focussingon a particular type of explanation for bank profitability. We evaluate a broad field of research by introducing a general framework for a profit maximizing bank and demonstrate how different types of models can be...

This paper attempts to estimate comparable efficiency scores for European banks operating in the Single Market in the EU. Using a data set of more than 5000 large commercial banks from all major European banking markets over the period 1993-2004, the application of meta-frontiers enables us to...

This article examines to what extent and how the presence of gazelles, young high-impact firms, is related to the growth of industries over time. For this purpose, we analyze gazelles in The Netherlands over a 12-year period, annually from 1997 until 2008, and relate them to the dynamics of...

In this paper, we show the importance of accounting for heterogeneity among sample firms in stochastic frontier analysis. For a fairly homogenous sample of German savings and cooperative banks, we analyze how alternative theoretical assumptions regarding the nature of heterogeneity can be...

The inability of most bank merger studies to control for hidden bailouts may lead to biased results. In this study, we employ a unique data set of approximately 1,000 mergers to analyze the determinants of bank mergers. We use data on the regulatory intervention history to distinguish between...