The "quiet life hypothesis (QLH)" posits that banks enjoy the advantages of market power in terms of foregone revenues or cost savings. We suggest a united approach to measure competition and efficiency simultaneously to test this hypothesis. We estimate bank-specific Lerner indices as measures...

We test whether output growth in European economic agglomeration regions depends on financial development. To this end we suggest a relative measure of the quality of financial institutions rather than the usual quantity proxy of financial development. In order to measure the quality of...

We investigate the consistency of efficiency scores derived with two competing frontier methods in the financial economics literature: Stochastic Frontier and Data Envelopment Analysis. We sample 34,192 observations for all German universal banks and analyze whether efficiency measures yield...

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...

We motivate the formulation of market equilibria as a mixed complementarity problem (MCP) in order to bridge the gap between bottom-up energy system models and top-down general equilibrium models for energy policy analysis. Our objective is primarily pedagogic. We first lay out that the MCP...