Productivity growth and biased technological change in UK airports

In this paper we estimate the total factor productivity of UK airports using a Malmquist index. Productivity change is factored into an index of efficiency change and an index of technological change. Technological change is further decomposed into indexes that measure the bias in the production of outputs, the bias in the employment of inputs, and the magnitude of the shift in the production frontier. Airports are ranked according to their productivity change for the period 2000–2005. Economic implications are derived.     

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Herding in the German Mutual Fund Industry

This paper analyses the trading activity of German mutual funds in the 1998–2002 period to investigate whether German mutual fund managers are engaged in herding behaviour. Another objective of the study is to determine the impact of this herd‐like trading on stock prices. Our results provide evidence of herding and positive feedback trading by German mutual fund managers. We show that a significant portion of herding detected in the German market is associated with spurious herding as a consequence of changes in benchmark index composition. Investigating the impact of mutual fund herding on stock prices, we find that herding seems to neither destabilise nor stabilise stock prices.     

Stable partitions in a model with group-dependent feasible sets

Summary. In this paper we consider a model of group formation where group of individuals may have different feasible sets. We focus on two polar cases, increasing returns, when the set of feasible alternatives increases if a new member joins the group, and decreasing returns, when a new member has an opposite effect and reduces the number of alternatives available for the enlarged group. We examine two notions, stability and strong stability of group structures, that correspond to Nash and Strong Nash equilibrium of the associated non-cooperative game, and identify the classes of stable and strongly stable environments.Received: 29 June 2003, Revised: 17 February 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C71, C72, D62, D71.The previos version of this paper has been written while the second author was visiting the Technical University of Dresden. He wishes to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its generous support and the Technical University of Dresden for its hospitality. The authors are grateful to an anonymous referee for useful comments.