In this paper we examine the performance of the target setting procedure employed by one of the largest savings banks in Spain, Caja de Ahorros del Mediterraneo, to evaluate the operating performance of its branch offices. We begin by evaluating the ability of the branch offices to meet the...

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...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the efficiency of the travel agencies operatingin Spain, and to examine the determining factors of such efficiency, in terms of verticalintegration, market concentration, size and performance. The methodology employed is based on different techniques for the...

This paper presents a model in which players interact via the formation of costly links and the benefits of bilateral interactions are determined by a coordination game. A novel contribution of this paper is that the fraction of the cost borne by each player involved in a bilateral link is not...

Traditional efficiency measures neglect bank risk and, even when risk is accounted for, do not differentiate between the portion subject to managerial control (¿internal¿) versus the portion that is exogenous and is part of a changing environment (¿external¿). This paper proposes a new...

Increased competition and the attempts of European banks to increase their presence in other markets may have affected the efficiency and credit risk. The first of this aspects is based on the incentive to the banks to reduce cost in order to gain in competitiveness. The second is associated to...

The objective of this study is to analyze the macroeconomic performance of 16 Ibero- American countries over the period 1980- 199 1. Macroeconomic performance is defined as the ability of a country's macroeconomic managers to provide four welfare-enhancing economic services to their citizens: a...

Let µ be a rational distribution over a finite alphabet, and ( ) be a n-periodic sequences which first n elements are drawn i.i.d. according to µ. We consider automata of bounded size that input and output at stage t. We prove the existence of a constant C such that, whenever , with...

This paper presents a model of network formation with costly links. We endogenize the amount of cost born by each player involved in a bilateral link by considering that these shares result from bargaining. We analyze this feature in a context of coordination games. We show that, if the cost of...

In many economic and social contexts, individual players choose their partners and also decide ona mode of behavior in interactions with these partners. This paper develops a simple model toexamine the interaction between partner choice and individual behavior in games of coordination.An...