0000000000530252
AUTHOR
Rolf Färe
Revisiting the quiet life hypothesis in banking using nonparametric techniques
Early studies testing the quiet life hypothesis in banking found strong evidence that banks in more concentrated markets exhibit lower cost efficiency levels. More recent studies have reexamined the issue in different contexts, with mixed results. These approaches are based on stipulating a linear re- lationship between market power and efficiency in banking, which might be problematic, as suggested by the literature on efficiency analysis. We explore how bank cost efficiency measures are related to market power using flexible techniques, which are more consistent with those employed to measure efficiency in the first stage of the analysis. Our study focuses on the Spanish banking industry,…
Environmental performance: an index number approach
Abstract Tyteca [J. Environ. Manage. 46 (1996) 281] reviews the literature on environmental performance indicators. In that paper he calls for an index that simultaneously accounts for resources used, good outputs produced and pollutants or undesirable outputs emitted. Here, we provide a formal index number of environmental performance which can be computed using data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques. The implicit benchmark is that of finding the highest ratio of good to bad outputs. Our environmental performance index is constructed from distance functions which implies that it satisfies a number of desirable properties. Since the component distance functions require only information …