Immigrants in Germany display a poor earnings performance relative to natives. Arguing that human capital endowments identify earnings potentials rather than actual earnings, this paper estimates a stochastic earnings frontier and searches for systematic differences between natives and migrants...

Based on an unbalanced panel of all Bavarian cooperative banks for the years of 1989-95 which includes information on 243 mergers, we analyze motives for and cost effects of small-scale mergers in German banking. Estimating a frontier cost function with a timevariable stochastic efficiency term...