The impact of technological change on bank performance

Quarterly call report data for 225 banks over twenty-six quarters are used to estimate a quadratic cost function to provide a measure of technological change within the banking industry. The nature of the relationship between technological change and bank performance is then examined. A logit model is formulated to estimate the likelihood that banks will display a positive level of technological development. Return on assets and return on equity are selected as measures of banking performance. The results suggest that technological change is significantly related to over-all banking performance. Finally, a significant relationship is indicated between bank size and profitability and the rate at which banks implement technological change.     

A multi-component enhanced Russell measure of efficiency: With application to water supply plans

Public water providers aim at developing a water supply plan (WSP) that not only provides a reliable and satisfactory level of service but also is efficient in terms of performance. This paper deals with evaluating the performance of WSPs within the framework of multi-component data envelopment analysis. Specifically, we consider the overall performance of each WSP as a decision making unit (DMU) so that economic, social, hygienic, technological, managerial and environmental performances of the WSP make up independent components of the defined DMU. To assess the performance of a set of WPSs, we propose a multi-component enhanced Russell measure of efficiency that takes all sources of inefficiency into account. We show that the proposed measure can be decomposed into individual efficiency measures at component level. This decomposition much enhances the efficiency of computing the proposed measure, noting the fact that this measure is obtained by solving a single linear program. It also guarantees the proposed measure to inherit two important—unit invariance and strong monotonicity—properties of the conventional enhanced Russell measure. In our empirical study, we apply our model to evaluate the efficiency of 10 urban WSPs in Qom city of Iran. In line with experts’ practical opinions, our findings reveal that the (relatively) most efficient WSP is to construct a potable water network and separation of non-drinking water network for urban usage.     

Productivity,price recovery,capacity constraints and their financial consequences

Mining and fishing are both extractive industries, although one resource is renewable and the other is not. Miners and fishers pursue financial objectives, although their objectives may differ. In both industries financial performance is influenced by productivity and prices. Finally, in both industries capacity constraints influence financial performance, perhaps but not necessarily through their impact on productivity, and both industries encounter external as well as internal capacity constraints. In this study we develop an analytical framework that links all four phenomena. We use return on assets to measure financial performance, and our analytical framework is provided by the duPont triangle. We measure productivity change in two ways, with a theoretical technology-based index and with empirical price-based indexes. We measure price change with empirical quantity-based indexes. We measure internal capacity utilization by relating a pair of output quantity vectors representing actual output and full capacity output, and we develop physical and economic measures of internal capacity utilization. We also show how external capacity constraints can restrict the ability to reach full capacity output. The analytical framework has productivity change, price change and change in capacity utilization influencing change in return on assets.     

Efficiency and Technological Change in the U.S. Brewing Industry

This study demonstrates that the measurement of technological change and economic efficiency are tightly linked. Efficiency measures may depend on carefully controlling for technological change, while tests of technological change may be sensitive to empirical model specifications. Moreover, the study underlines Solow's (1994) and Romer's (1994) admonition that econometricians should pay attention to industry and institutional evidence in building models of technological change. The empirical results presented here suggest that there has been substantial technological change in the U.S. brewing industry from 1950 to 1992. This occurred in the form of a dramatic shift in technology beginning with the introduction of super breweries in about 1972. There has also been a substantial increase in scale economies, which undoubtedly caused many inefficiently small firms to exit the industry during the 1960s and 1970s. Further results suggest that a more complete specification of technological change and the stochastic nature of the frontier production function leads to higher and more tenable estimates of efficiency.     

The impact of corporate governance on state-owned and non-state-owned firms efficiency in China

The purpose of this paper is to expand the literature on the corporate governance of transition economies by analyzing the relationship between corporate governance and productive efficiency in China's publicly listed manufacturing industry firms. We use the principal component analysis and the hybrid meta-frontier DEA model, separating inputs into radial inputs that change proportionally and non-radial inputs that change non-proportionally to measure the technical efficiency and technology gap ratios of publicly listed Chinese firms in different manufacturing industries during 2010–2013. The input variables are the net value of fixed assets, staff number, and the characteristics of the corporate governance system, while the output variables are gross revenue and total profit. The empirical result shows that inefficiency due to corporate governance is the main reason for lower efficiency in most manufacturing firms. For the technology gap ratio (TGR), the metal and mineral and the machinery, equipment and instrument are the two highest efficient sectors, whereas the paper and allied products sub-industry has the lowest efficiency during 2010–2013. In addition, the ratio of state-owned firms whose inefficiency is mainly caused by corporate governance to total state-owned firms is greater than that of non-state-owned firms in each year. The TGR analysis shows that the efficiency performance of non-state-owned firms is greater than state-owned firms.     

丝绸之路河西走廊物流业效率演化分析

构建了分析河西走廊物流业效率演化的指标体系,基于2009-2017年河西走廊物流业统计数据,运用DEA-Malmquist指数法测算了各市物流业效率和技术进步率,采用Tobit回归模型分析了该地区物流业效率的影响因素,并从省内、省域间、各经济区域间三个方面进行了对比分析。实证分析表明,相较于全国各省市地区,河西走廊物流业整体水平较低,物流业效率和技术进步率的强正相关性普遍存在,其物流业发展对政策偏向具有较强的依赖性;同时,技术进步率低下和基础设施匮乏也是制约物流业发展的重要因素。基于此,从政策照顾与资金投入、科技进步与管理水平和市场运营与体系建设三个方面,为河西走廊物流业发展提出了建议与改善措施。     

Estimating global frontier shifts and global Malmquist indices

The Malmquist index is a measure of productivity changes, of which an important component is the frontier shift or technological change. Often technological change can be viewed as a global phenomenon, and therefore individual or local measures of technological changes are aggregated into an overall measure, traditionally using geometric means. In this paper we propose a way of calculating global Malmquist indices and global frontier shift indices which provides a better estimation of the true frontier shift and furthermore is easy to calculate. Using simulation studies we show how this method outperforms the traditional aggregation approach, especially for sparsely populated production possibility sets and for frontiers that also change shape over time. Furthermore, our global indices can be used for unbalanced panels without disregarding any information. Finally, we show how the global indices are meaningful for calculating differences between frontiers from different groups rather than different time periods as illustrated in a small case study of bank branches in different countries.      

The influence of modularity and industry clockspeed on reverse logistics strategy: Implications for the purchasing function

Environmental policies and recent take-back legislation pose new management challenges and require many companies to come up with new strategies and corresponding processes for recovering their products. Some leading firms have already succeeded in a field marked by ever-greater levels of uncertainty and material flows. However, simply mimicking the example of these leading companies does not seem to be suitable for all companies. A configurational approach is needed to understand why this is the case. This paper therefore considers two case studies to analyze the effects of industry clockspeed and product architecture on recovery options involving repair, refurbishing, or reuse. Its findings suggest that the recovery and reuse of key components is an economically viable reverse logistics strategy in a high-modularity case; in contrast, scrapping or recycling of materials is often the most viable strategy for integrated architectures. Different strategies must also be employed for high and low clockspeed situations. The demands that recovery activities place on a company's purchasing function is also illustrated in the second part of the paper.     

On the industry experience premium and labor mobility

There is evidence that experience premium differs across industries. We propose a theoretical model for explaining these differences. We assume that labor mobility brings external knowledge to the firm, which increases its productivity. We find that industry experience premium is decreasing in inter-firm mobility costs, while increasing in the learning-by-doing and the technological level of the industry. Moreover, it has a U-shape relationship with the level of learning-by-hiring, the substitutability between different types of experienced workers and the variety of knowledge in the industry. Results are consistent with the empirical findings that R&D-intensive industries have steeper wage profiles.     

Assessing Aggregate Structural Change

The aim of this paper is to investigate the evolution of Italian aggregate structural change over the years 1965–85. We use annual input–output (IO) tables in current and constant prices to derive an aggregate index of structural change. We adopt several techniques for such an explorative analysis. First, we borrow from qualitative matrix analysis and graph theory some basic concepts to assess direct and indirect links among sectors, and interrelatedness measures are derived in a straightforward way. However, qualitative analysis of indirect links may be flawed, since it can establish a path that is quantitatively negligible. Then, we turn our attention to a non-standard quantitative index derived from structural path analysis, expressed by a simple function of the input matrix determinant. Since empirical findings indicate a structural break in 1975, we derive another measure of technical change: the dominant eigenvalue. Such an index has several interesting properties but no clear relationship to the circularity process implicit in the Leontief model. Results for constant- and actual-price IO tables are discussed and compared with main macro-economic variables over the sample. Empirical findings indicate a relationship between investment, variability in final demand and aggregate structural change.     

The predictive accuracy of credit ratings: Measurement and statistical inference

Credit ratings are ordinal predictions of the default risk of an obligor. The most commonly used measure for evaluating their predictive accuracy is the Accuracy Ratio, or equivalently, the area under the ROC curve. The disadvantages of these measures are that they treat default as a binary variable, thus neglecting the timing of default events, and they fail to use all of the information available from censored observations. We present an alternative measure which is related to the Accuracy Ratio but does not suffer from these drawbacks. As a second contribution, we study statistical inference for the Accuracy Ratio and the proposed measure in the case of multiple cohorts of obligors with overlapping lifetimes. We derive methods which use more sample information and lead to tests which are more powerful than alternatives which filter just the independent part of the dataset. All procedures are illustrated in the empirical section using a dataset of S&P Credit Ratings.     

Exploration and development of U.S. oil and gas fields, 1955-2002

We study the exploration and development of oil and gas fields in the U.S. over the period 1955-2002. We make four contributions to explain the economic evolution of the oil and gas industry during this period. First, we derive a testable model of the dynamics of competitive oil and gas field exploration and development. Second, we show how to empirically distinguish Hotelling scarcity effects from effects due to technological change. Third, we test these hypotheses using statewide panel data of exploration and development drilling. We find that the time paths of exploration, development and total wells drilled are dominated by Hotelling scarcity effects. Finally, we offer an explanation for why fixed costs from exploration can make the contracting equilibrium in the mineral rights market efficient.     

Stochastic Technical Change and Procyclical TFP The Case of Italian Agriculture

The paper questionsthe use of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) measures as a proxyfor the technological level in Italian agriculture. TFP growthreveals a cyclical behaviour and a short-run component due toshocks on both the demand and supply sides. In order to identifyreal long-run technological change, a Kalman filter procedureis applied to a stochastic process depicting the generation oftechnical change induced by R&D and Extension expenditure.The empirical evidence reveals that short-term shocks greatlyaffect the traditional measure of productivity. A better indicatorof technological progress can be obtained by estimating the long-runcomponent of productivity, which seems to be significantly inducedby R&D-Extension public expenditure.     

Measuring systemic risk of the Chinese banking industry: A wavelet-based quantile regression approach

In systemic risk measure, a large amount of literature has emerged, but few of them take into account the multi-scale natures of financial data. Considering these natures, we develop a novel W-QR-CoVaR method to measure systemic risk. To be specific, the W-QR-CoVaR method combines the wavelet multiresolution analysis (MRA) with the conditional value-at-risk (CoVaR) method based on the quantile regression (QR) framework. We then apply it to measure the systemic risk in the Chinese banking industry covering the period from September 2007 to September 2018. Our experiment results show that the hybrid W-QR-CoVaR method performs better than the traditional CoVaR method in terms of predictive accuracy. Furthermore, we also explore the relation between the systemic risk contribution of each individual bank and the bank-specific characteristics. Size and leverage appear to be the most robustness determinants. The findings suggest that regulators should pay more attention to the banks with smaller size and higher leverage.     

Regulation and technological change in the American meat industry

The effects of regulation upon technological change in the American meat industry in the period between 1950 and 1978 are examined in terms of the relationship between three alternative models — neoclassical, X-efficiency, and technological exogeneity —and the behavior of regulatory agencies. The paper is based upon patent data, equipment approvals by the United States Department of Agriculture and interviews with meat equipment and meat processing firms. Each theory was found to account for some of the observed transactions between regulation and technological change. Conversely, no single theory encompasses all observed effects.Regulations have added to the cost of developing new products. Increased uncertainty in the late 1970s over the standards sought by regulatory agencies have similarly increased the uncertainties of the profitability of R&D in selected product lines. This uncertainty was also found to be inducing firms to substitute product development via mergers for their own R&D. The Humane Slaughter Act was the proximate spur for technological advances that lead to a rationalization of production processes. The innovations that resulted from this act and from other regulatory standards highlighted, in accordance with the X-efficiency framework, technological opportunities that existed prior to and independent of changes in regulatory standards. Much of the momentum for technological change in the industry was shaped by an initial set of technological advances and the subsequent working through of production bottlenecks in an interrelated production system. These advances were largely independent of and unaffected by regulatory standards.Indeed, there is reason to believe that regulatory standards may themselves have an element of endogeneity in terms of the feasible set of best practice techniques. Thus at any particular time, technological change may serve to generate a production frontier towards which a regulatory agency might seem to propel an industry.Overall, our judgment is that regulation had little discernible impact on the pace of technological change related to the production and distribution of ground beef in the period between 1950 and 1978. If there has been any net effect, regulation probably served more to stimulate than to inhibit technological change.     

Influence of subcontracting on innovation and economic performance of SMEs in Indian automobile industry

Trans-national corporations (TNCs) expanding their production bases to developing countries having better conditions of manufacturing and domestic markets provide increasing opportunities for local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to have subcontracting relationships with these TNCs. Even though some theoretical and a few empirical studies throw light on the nature of assistance provided by TNCs to local SMEs through subcontracting relationships, none of the studies so far quantitatively analysed the role of this assistance on the innovative performance of SMEs leading to better economic performance. This paper probes the extent and diversity of assistance received by SMEs from a TNC through subcontracting and its influence on technological innovations and economic performance of SMEs, in the Indian automobile industry. Indian SMEs were able to receive mainly product related and purchase process assistance, thereby implying that subcontracting is largely confined to purchase–supply relationships. However, assistance received through subcontracting is beneficial as it promoted technological innovations of SMEs: the higher the degree of assistance, the higher the level of innovations carried out by these SMEs, which, in turn facilitated their economic performance. Thus, this paper substantiates in the Indian context that subcontracting relationship with a TNC can be an important source of technological innovations and enhanced economic performance for SMEs.     

An empirical analysis of green supply chain management in the German automotive industry

The purpose of this paper is the empirical investigation of the status quo of green supply chain management in the German automotive industry from a practitioner's point of view. Several aspects of green supply chain management, such as the point of time of implementation, the driving forces, the relevance of intended goals and their particular realization and the adoption of eco‐programs with suppliers and customers as well as internal and external barriers are analyzed. Furthermore, the link to different performance criteria is tested by inductive statistics in order to show the potential of green supply chain management for competitiveness. For this study, managers from the automotive supply industry in Germany were asked about their estimations in this regard. The main conclusion is that managers express the need for green supply chain management on the one hand but also see corresponding problems in terms of required resources on the other hand. Furthermore, the analyses show that green supply chain management leads to higher performance in terms of several performance criteria. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Accounting for heterogeneous technologies in the banking industry: a time-varying stochastic frontier model with threshold effects

This paper investigates the existence of heterogeneous technologies in the US commercial banking industry through the nondynamic panel threshold effects estimation technique proposed by Hansen (Econometrica 64:413–430, 1999, Econometrica 68:575–603, 2000a). We employ the total assets as a threshold variable, which is typically considered as a proxy for bank’s size in the banking literature. We modify the threshold effects model to allow for time-varying effects, wherein these are modeled by a time polynomial of degree two as in Cornwell et al. (J Econom 46:185–200, 1990) model. Threshold effects estimation allows us to sort banks into discrete groups based on their size in a structural and consistent manner. We determine seven such distinct technology-groups within which banks are allowed to share the same technology parameters. We provide estimates of individual and group efficiency scores, as well as of those of returns to scale and measures of technological change for each group. The presence of the threshold(s) is tested via bootstrap procedure outlined in Hansen (Econometrica 64:413–430, 1999) and the relationship between bank size and efficiency ratios is investigated.     

Incorporating Price-Induced Innovation in a Symmetric Generalised McFadden Cost Function with Several Outputs

This paper proposes a multiple-output Symmetric Generalised McFadden (SGM) cost function, incorporating both exogenous and endogenous technological change. Whilst exogenous technological change is captured by the usual time trend, endogenous or price-induced technological change is cast within a partial-adjustment framework involving lagged input prices. The study points to various dimensions or components of technological change, and allows to disentangle pure factor substitution, given the state of the technology, from factor substitution due to price-induced changes in technology. Under the conditions of non-jointness in input quantities, the model further allows to identify technological change biases for each output separately. An empirical application is presented in which the proposed model is applied to time-series data on the feed manufacturing industry in Belgium. To improve on the econometrics, the SGM cost function also incorporates linear splines.     

Managing knowledge assets under conditions of radical change: The case of the pharmaceutical industry

There is no industry where firms link their search for competitive advantage more closely to intellectual property (IP) than those in the pharmaceutical industry. Yet a major paradigm change is occurring in this industry. New technological developments are increasingly being driven by advances in biology, nanotechnology, and the computational sciences. In this paper, we investigate how this radical change in the investigation, discovery, and manufacture of pharmaceuticals has affected intellectual property management practices.Large pharmaceutical firms, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and public institutional knowledge generators have recently started to respond by developing new IP management techniques born from the use of consortia to manage the complexities of knowledge generation. Hence, we leverage innovation and knowledge management literature, and use the innovation journey and case study methodologies to investigate both traditional pharmaceutical IP practices as well as emerging strategies. We distil from this effort an IP model—the transition point model—designed to assist firms to effectively manage both knowledge assets and the associated intellectual property in the current paradigm.