This paper constructs a model economy to explain how uncertainty shocks can cause business cycle fluctuations. In the model, during times of high uncertainty, the representative agent, due to risk aversion motives, moves resources from a high risk/high return production process to a low risk/low return production process. High uncertainty thus causes the firm level technology frontier to endoge...

The standard assumption in the efficiency literature, that firms attempt to produce on the production frontier, may not hold in markets that are not perfectly competitive, where the production decisions of all firms will determine the market price, i.e., an increase in a firm’s output level leads to a lower market clearing price and potentially lower profits. This paper models both the producti...

introduction: in the developed world, particularly in developing countries, livestock is the most important agricultural sub-sector.livestock of primary and secondary industries has an especial place in the national economybecause of their greatvalue of products, creating job opportunities, providing health products for consumers, increasing export income of the economy throughaccessing global ...

This study examines the productivity growth of the nationwide banks of China and a sample of city commercial, banks for the eleven years to 2007. Estimates of total factor productivity growth are constructed with appropriate confidence intervals, using a bootstrap method for the Malmquist index. The study adjusts for the quality of the output by accounting for the non-performing loans on the ba...

Welfare economics provides the basis for judging the achievements of markets and policy makers in allocating resources. Its most powerful conceptual tool is the utility possibility frontier. This defines the set of utility allocations that can be achieved in a society subject to the constraints of tastes and technologies. Any allocation on the frontier cannot be Pareto dominated and hence would...

A key result of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is that the market portfolio— the portfolio of all assets in which each asset’s weight is proportional to its total market capitalization—lies on the mean-variance-efficient frontier, the set of portfolios having mean-variance characteristics that cannot be improved upon. Therefore, the CAPM cannot be consistent with efficient frontiers for...

Mean-variance (MV) analysis is often sensitive to model mis-specification or uncertainty, meaning that the MV efficient portfolios constructed with an estimate of the model parameters (i.e., the expected return vector and covariance of asset returns) can give very poor performance for another set of parameters that is similar and statistically hard to distinguish from the one used in the analys...