The evolution of scale economies in US banking

Continued consolidation of the US banking industry and a general increase in the size of banks have prompted some policymakers to consider policies that discourage banks from getting larger, including explicit caps on bank size. However, limits on the size of banks could entail economic costs if they prevent banks from achieving economies of scale. This paper presents new estimates of returns to scale for US banks based on nonparametric, local‐linear estimation of bank cost, revenue, and profit functions. We report estimates for both 2006 and 2015 to compare returns to scale some 7 years after the financial crisis and 5 years after enactment of the Dodd–Frank Act with returns to scale before the crisis. We find that a high percentage of banks faced increasing returns to scale in cost in both years, including most of the 10 largest bank holding companies. Also, while returns to scale in revenue and profit vary more across banks, we find evidence that the largest four banks operate under increasing returns to scale.     

Multi-level and mixed-level <Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis>-circulant supersaturated designs

Supersaturated designs (SSDs) constitute an important class of fractional factorial designs that could be extremely useful in factor screening experiments. Most of the existing studies have focused on balanced designs. This paper provides a new lower bound for the \(E(f_{NOD})\)-optimality measure of SSDs with general run sizes. This bound is a generalization of existing bounds since it is applicable to both balanced and unbalanced designs. Optimal multi and mixed-level, balanced and nearly balanced SSDs are constructed by applying a k-circulant type methodology. Necessary and sufficient conditions are introduced for the generator vectors, in order to pre-ensure the optimality of the constructed k-circulant SSDs. The provided lower bounds were used to measure the efficiency of the generated designs. The presented methodology leads to a number of new families of improved SSDs, providing tools for directly constructing optimal or nearly-optimal k-circulant designs by just checking the corresponding generator vector.     

Confounding and collinearity in regression analysis: a cautionary tale and an alternative procedure,illustrated by studies of British voting behaviour

Quality & Quantity - Many ecological- and individual-level analyses of voting behaviour use multiple regressions with a considerable number of independent variables but few discussions of their...     

The gift of advice: communication in a bilateral gift exchange game

We augment a standard bilateral gift exchange game so employees can send messages at the same time as choosing an effort level. Employee effort (controlling for wages) is unaffected by allowing messages, but wages dramatically increase. Messages affect wages because employees give managers advice to set higher wages, usually explaining that this will result in higher effort. This advice prompts managers to try higher wages, helping them learn that raising wages increases their payoffs. In a follow-up experiment, we directly provide managers with additional information about the relationship between wages and effort. This too causes wages to increase, but to a lesser extent than allowing messages. Our results highlight the critical role of learning in generating gains from positive gift exchange.     

La Création D'activité: Prise D'autonomie Et Médiation Entre Acteurs

Résumé Depuis le début des années 1980 des initiatives d'accompagnement et de financement de petites activités économiques à destination des personnes en situation d'exclusion économique et sociale se sont développées dans les pays du Nord. Relevant du champ du « tiers secteur >>, et en particulier de l'économie solidaire contemporaine, elles visent à la fois à répondre à des besoins insatisfaits et à introduire le principe d'un droit à l'initiative économique. Leur conception des inégalités économique et sociale, axée sur l'approche par les capabilités d'Amartya Sen, permet de comprendre leur mode d'organisation combinant une double dimension financière et sociale.     

工业化进程中防止农业萎缩之对策

在工业化进程中,资源自农业向工业的转移,工业的加速发展,往往引起农业萎缩.如何协调工业与农业的关系,如何对待农业萎缩问题,是工业化进程中经济能否持续发展的关键.     

Beyond choice: investigating the sensitivity and validity of measures of strength of preference

Many experiments investigating different decision theories have relied heavily on pairwise choices between lotteries. These are easy to incentivise, but often yield only limited dichotomous information. This paper considers whether respondents’ judgments about their strength of preference (SoP) for one alternative over another can usefully supplement standard choice data. We report extensive evidence that such judgments show sensitivity to variations in question format and parameter values in the directions we should expect, not only within-subject but also between-sample. We illustrate how such judgments can usefully supplement standard pairwise choice data and enrich our understanding of observed behaviour.     

A Second Elementary Proposition Concerning the Formation of Customs Unions

The conclusions of the 1976 Kemp–Wan proposition are shown to be valid even if, after the formation of a customs union, the tariff vectors of some non-member countries are optimally chosen.
JEL Classification Numbers: F02, F12, F13, F15.     

Increasing life expectancy and optimal retirement in general equilibrium

We analytically assess the effects of changes in longevity on the interest rate, the consumption-savings behavior, and the optimal retirement decision within a dynamic general equilibrium setting. We derive a simple sufficient condition for which the optimal retirement age always increases with life expectancy. Numerical assessment reveals that for realistic parameter values that reflect the situation in industrialized countries, the optimal retirement age indeed increases with life expectancy and the sufficient condition tends to be fulfilled. Together with the fact that the actual retirement age did not increase in industrialized countries over the last decades, while there have been large improvements in longevity, this leads us to conclude that strong monetary and institutional incentives for early retirement exist and these counteract the effects of increasing life expectancy. Our policy conclusion is that the retirement age should be partially linked to life expectancy and that incentives for early retirement should be removed.     

基于隐性知识传播的虚拟企业知识协作网络研究

隐性知识是虚拟企业竞争优势的来源,而知识协作又是传播隐性知识的重要途径.知识团体之间的知识协作关系形成了虚拟企业复杂的知识协作网络.为全面把握虚拟企业知识协作网络的结构,建立了基于某隐性知识传播的虚拟企业知识协作无标度网络,并对之进行了深入探讨.