Analyzing a comprehensive database of limited liability manufacturing firms this paper investigates the relation between a firm’s financial situation and its conditional expected growth rate. Specifically, using quantile regressions, we obtain a quantitative characterization of this relation...

The study of firms' default has attracted wide interest among both practitioners and scholars. However, attention has often been limited to a relatively small set of financial variables. In this work, we try to increase the scope of analysis extending the investigation to other possible...

In this paper Sato’s two-level CES production function has been estimated by nonlinear regression carried out through five different methods of optimization, namely, the Hooke-Jeeves Pattern Moves (HJPM), the Hooke-Jeeves-Quasi-Newton (HJQN), the Rosenbrock-Quasi-Newton (RQN), the Differential...

The U.S. and EU Merger Guidelines strongly emphasize the relevance of the ease of entry argument in merger evaluations. Up to now, very little is known empirically about how mergers affect the resulting number of firms in the markets. We empirically test this aspect of mergers using a...

The U.S. and EU Merger Guidelines strongly emphasize the relevance of the "ease of entry" argument in merger evaluations. Up to now, very little is known empirically about how mergers affect entry and exit, and the resulting number of firms in the markets. We empirically test this aspect of...

The U.S. and EU Merger Guidelines strongly emphasize the relevance of the “ease of entry” argument in merger evaluations. Up to now, very little is known empirically about how mergers affect entry and exit, and the resulting number of firms in the markets. We empirically test this aspect of...

When benchmarking production units by non-parametric methods like data envelopment analysis (DEA), an assumption has to be made about the returns to scale of the underlying technology. Moreover, it is often also relevant to compare the frontiers across samples of producers. Until now, no exact...

It is the objective of this paper to quantify the significance of fundamental factors (like rising fuel costs) and of the increasing exercise of market power on rising prices in the German wholesale electricity market. A successive MIP/LP approach was used for this. The calculations show that,...