The way that bilinguals produce phones in each of their languages provides a window into the nature of the bilingual phonological space. For stop consonants, if early sequential bilinguals, whose languages differ in voice onset time (VOT) distinctions, produce native-like VOTs in each of their languages, it would imply that they have developed separate first and second language phones, that is,...

This paper compares the performance of regional banks and national banks in Korea for the period of 19922004 by examining how the profitability of these two groups differs, identifying major determinants of profitability for each group, and explaining their similarities and differences. Two competing hypotheses, the market power hypothesis and the efficient structure hypothesis, are tested in a...

We study the effects of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Term Auction Facility (TAF) on globally active banks. We exploit a unique dataset with information on all foreign activities of German banks’ affiliates both, inand outside the US. All German parent banks with US affiliates tapped TAF liquidity, which mitigates self-selection concerns. This setting allows testing whether foreign affiliate activ...

This paper focuses on physical and psychological traumas of children during and after the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). There were two evacuation programmes: one organised by the Greek Communist Party to seven countries of Eastern Europe and the other by the Greek government and Queen Frederica to children's homes (paidopoleis) in the country. The paper also argues that Greek refugee children ex...

during the last two decades, financial institutions worldwide have witnessed a lot of stress in managing their margins in wake of the new risks, challenges and increase in the competition posed to them by the factors of liberalization and deregulation. the key to create value and achieve competitive edge lies in the better operational efficiency and productivity of these institutions under such...

This study examines bank risk by investigating the equity and loan portfolio characteristics of publicly-traded bank holding companies. Unlike the pattern for non-financial firms, equity betas of large banks are two to five times greater than those of small banks. In explaining this, we note that regulation imposes an effective cap on banks’ equity volatility. Because the portfolios of small ba...

This study investigates the profit efficiency (PROFEFF) of small banks (those under $500 million in total assets) for 1990–96. Assuming that small banks and large banks use the same production technology, we find, consistent with Berger and Mester [J. Bank. Finance 21 (1997) 875], that small banks are more profit efficient than large banks. Small banks in non-metropolitan statistical areas (non...

Greek ToBI is a system for the annotation of (Standard) Greek spoken corpora, that encodes intonational, prosodic and phonetic information. It is used to develop a large and publicly available database of prosodically annotated utterances for research, engineering and educational purposes. Greek ToBI is based on the system developed for American English (ToBI), but includes novel features (“tie...

Developments in risk-transfer instruments and risk management techniques in the last two decades have fundamentally changed how banks manage their assets and liabilities. In this document we show that, for all three sectors of German universal banks (private commercial banks, savings banks, and cooperative banks), asset-liability dependency declined over the period 1994-2007, the decline was st...