The allocation of public resources is an important concern of developed economies in modern societies and there are many studies that aim at measuring their efficiency. This work presents an efficiency assessment of public elementary schools in Andorra, a small country where there are three public educational systems (Andorran, Spanish – congregational and non-congregational-, and French). Therefore, the aim of this study is to compare the efficiency of public elementary schools among the different...

In this paper, we showed that patent pools can generate the highest welfare levels among different licensing arrangements. If the patents are blocking, the patentees are not in a horizontal relationship with respect to those patents. Therefore, the Antitrust Agency would be unlikely to challenge this arrangement. JEL Codes: K21, L41 and M21 ...

This paper discusses factors influencing Botswana women students’ attitudes to business ownership and barriers thereto. It addresses the gap in existing literature on women’s entrepreneurship in developing countries which predominantly report on entrepreneurship by uneducated, poor rural women in the informal sectors. Data was obtained in December, 2010 and July 2011 from a survey of seventy six University of Botswana women students and two focus group discussions with ten of these women in December...

Income inequality is an important socio-economic issue, which has deep implications on different aspects of an economy. Sometimes it is argued that, limited access to the opportunities for economic growth is one of the main reasons for persistent income inequality. Theoretically, such argument makes sense in a highly competitive market place. This issue has been discussed in Bergh and Nilsson (2010), Kim and Lin (2011), Benedict (2011), Acar and Dogruel (2012), Stevans (2012) among others. Using...

This paper focuses on the impact of the financial crisis on the productivity of thirty American banks. We have used CCR, BCC, and Malmquist models using data for 5 years. The models study the effects of technological improvements during the years after the financial crisis on national banks and regional banks. Total factor productivity growth rate is positive and technological efficiency is improved and has influenced more than technology to total factor productivity change over the entire sample...

Real estate markets around the world have undergone dynamic changes over the past decades, due to the globalisation and internationalisation of cross-border investments. This paper disentangles the factors that influence the determinants of cross border real estate investments in Asian countries, particularly in South Korea and Singapore, from the perspective of cultural value – Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI). 200 survey samples were collected from these two countries, measuring the investors’...

The work presented here aims to show different strategies in order to increase the replacement rate obtained by a worker at retirement age. Usually, these strategies are set in a deterministic approach, but in this work we assume that the expected returns of the funds have a stochastic behavior. For this purpose, we take as basis the current accumulation model from a representative Latin American country as Mexico, from which we undertake sensitive analysis in order to optimize the asset allocation...

After 1980s, the long-term macroeconomic instability in Turkish Economy has become a serious problem within financial liberalization. Recent institutional changes in Turkish financial market drove us to reexamine the dynamic relationship between the financial instability and macroeconomic instability. The aim of this study is to investigate the causal relationship between economic instability and financial instability for Turkish Economy. The data used in the study are quarterly and cover the period...

This study evaluates and compares the efficacy of two competing approaches to value-at-risk for determining the transaction exposure of a multinational enterprise (MNE) conducting business in six specific currencies covering the 2011-2012 time period. These approaches are: 1) traditional value-at-risk (VaR), also called the variance-covariance approach, and 2) modified value-at-risk (MVaR). Specifically, the maximum 1-day holding period losses for these two approaches are estimated and compared to...

Many empirical researches have been dedicated to study the impacts of MNCs on host nations’ growth and trades; however, the consensus among them is still a far reaching destination. Among all aspects of the impact of MNCs, the externalities toward the local firms have lately gained the most attention. By using Thailand’s firm level database combined with an I/O table at the most disaggregate level, this paper is designed to empirically investigate the externalities from the presence of foreign-controlled...