The dramatic rise in bank failures over the last decade has led to a search for leading indicators so that costly bailouts might be avoided. While the quality of a bank’s management is generally acknowledged to be a key contributor to institutional collapse, it is usually excluded from early-warning models for lack of a metric. This paper describes a new approach for quantifying a bank’s managerial efficiency, using a data-envelopment-analysis model that combines multiple inputs and outputs to compute a scalar measure of efficiency. This new metric captures an elusive, yet crucial, element of institutional success: management quality. New failure-prediction models for detecting a bank’s troubled status which incorporate this explanatory variable have proven to be robust and accurate, as verified by in-depth empirical evaluations, cost sensitivity analyses, and comparisons with other published approaches.

In the United States credit unions are not-for-profit cooperative financial institutions, owned by and operated for the benefit of their members. Being part of a cooperative movement enhances the likelihood that credit unions will share performance-enhancing ideas, for the benefit of weak credit unions and the movement as a whole. In this paper we show how a conventional performance evaluation methodology has evolved into a novel performance enhancement methodology. The evolution of the methodology is the result of cooperations among individual credit union managements, movement officials and the authors. The evolution is illustrated with 1990 data on nearly 9,000 credit unions.

Technical efficiency measure can be classified as either radial or nonradial. While the theorical question of which is the better type of measure is unresolved, the radial measures enjoy much greater popularity than the nonradial measures in the empirical literature. To assess the impact of choice of measure, this paper offers an empirical comparison of one radial and three nonradial measures of technical efficiency, relative to a variable returns to scale DEA model with strong disposability. The distributions and ranking of these efficiency scores are examined for a sample of US banks.

L’hypothèse des anticipations rationnelles (AR) pose la question de savoir comment les agents ont acquis les informations indispensables pour les réaliser. L’idée à la base de la littérature sur l’apprentissage des AR est de supposer que si les agents ne connaissent pas la relation leur permettant de formuler des AR, ils sont susceptibles de l’apprendre avec le temps sur la base de l’expérience passée. Si les agents connaissent la forme mathématique de l’équation qui régit l’économie avec AR, leur méconnaissance se limitant à la valeur de certains paramètres, alors le modèle est qualifié de cohérent et converge vers un équilibre d’AR sous des conditions relativement générales. Le but de cette note est d’étendre cette notion de cohérence à des schémas d’aprentissage moins exigeants en termes informationnels, et de montrer au moyen d’un exemple que ces derniers sont néanmoins susceptibles de converger vers un équilibre d’AR.

In recent years Western governments have introduced a number of emergency measures in their fight against short run unemployment. In this paper a normative analysis concerning the joint implementation of two such measures is offered, viewing unemployment as involuntary, and taking account of the dissatisfaction cost (lack of the social status that having a job provides) borne by unemployed workers. Attention is paid to the existing trade-off between a policy of wage subsidies to the private sector aimed at stimulating employment and a policy of transfer payments to the unemployed intended to increase their purchasing power. In a simple general equilibrium model with wage rigidity, wage subsidy formulas are derived for two settings of incomes control.