Presidential Executive Order 12,866 requires federal agencies to design “cost-effective” regulations and to assess “costs and benefits” of these regulations on the basis of “the best reasonably obtainable scientific, technical, economic, and other information.” Benefit transfers are...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), as well as combinations thereof, are widely applied in incentive regulation practice, where the assessment of efficiency plays a major role in regulation design and benchmarking. Using a Monte Carlo simulation experiment,...

We study the differential impact of exchange rate volatility on cost efficiency and market structure when banks have non-trivial exposures to foreign currency operations. First, we document that cost efficiency estimates are both severely downward biased by 30% on average and generally not rank...