The Panzar-Rosse test has been widely applied to assess competitive conduct, often in specifications controlling for firm scale or using a price equation. We show that neither a price equation nor a scaled revenue function yields a valid measure for competitive conduct. Moreover, even an unscaled revenue function generally requires additional information about costs and market equilibrium to in...

The domain of multi level forecast combination is a challenging new domain containing a large potential for forecast improvements. This thesis presents a theoretical and experimental analysis of different types of forecast diversification on forecast error covariances and resulting combined forecast quality. Three types of diversification are used: (a) diversification concerning the level of le...

Which types of mergers are likely to be most productive for banks and other financial firms in the United States after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act? From a management perspective, mixing disparate firms may be difficult, but may offer significant gains from diversification. The opposite applies to matching similar firms. This paper considers life insurance, property and casualty insurance, securi...

Modern finance theory suggests that individual investor should hold a well-diversified portfolio instead of individual stocks. In practice, one only needs to hold limited number of stocks to achieve the effect of diversification, that is reducing the idiosyncratic volatility. In this paper, we study the benefit of diversification in emerging markets, such as the Chinese equity markets, where id...

Banking all over the world is moving in a new direction, as the memories of global financial crisis are gradually fading. In India, a new phase of the banking expansion is on the anvil and the reserve Bank of India has already announced license for the setting up of new banks, with many more likely to come in the near future. But the expansion of banking network is also fraught with risks as it...