Productivity growth decomposition with FE-IV approach: Rethinking Thai commercial banks after the financial crisis

To cope with the Asian Financial Crisis, Thai commercial banks have gone through a reconstructing period. This study aims to decompose the Total Factor Productivity growth (TFP) for Thai commercial banking industry with an output distance function. With an unbalanced panel dataset, we used the Fixed Effect (FE) model with Instrumental Variables (IV) to estimate the TFP growth empirically. We found the technical inefficiency change and scale effects were the two major contributors to the recent growth, while the input price effect of the premises and equipment was the major preventer of the growth. Moreover, the Thai commercial banking industry produced in decreasing return to scale, and the input–output allocation was not at the profit maximization optimum under the exogenous prices.     

Price convergence in US cities: a cointegration approach with two structural breaks

This article investigates how the price indices of major cities of the US respond to the shock from a city and from monetary policy. We find that the crisis of Bretton Woods system in 1968 and the oil crisis in 1974 should be incorporated as structural breaks in monetary policy variables and price indices. Using cointegration technique with structural break in our aggregated data, we find that the average half-life is 1.75 years, which is closer to what some of others found in disaggregated data, and that the interest rate is an effective tool for controlling cities’ price in short run.     

Extended generalized purchasing power parity and optimum currency area in East Asian countries

We build a model in which corporate governance allows for the adoption of an institution acting as a mechanism to control agency problems. Our model predicts that the incentive to adopt such an institution is decreasing in ownership concentration and increasing in free cash flow. Testing our theoretical model by means of a sample of 157 Italian listed companies over the period 2004–2007, we find that board composition favours independent members in firms with a large free cash flow, and executive members in firms with high ownership concentration, supporting the view of governance as a way to limit agency costs.