Performance of Financial Institutions or Macrojustice

Performance of Financial Institutions: Efficiency, Innovation, Regulation

Author: Patrick T Harker

The efficient operation of financial intermediaries--banks, insurance and pension fund firms, government agencies and so on--is instrumental for the efficient functioning of the financial system and the fueling of the economies of the twenty-first century. But what drives the performance of these institutions in today's global environment? In this volume, world-renowned scholars bring their expertise to bear on the issues. Primary among them are the definition and measurement of efficiency of a financial institution, benchmarks of efficiency, identification of the drivers of performance and measurement of their effects on efficiency, the impact of financial innovation and information technologies on performance, the effects of process design, human resource management policies, as well as others.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Preface
1	What Drives the Performance of Financial Institutions?	3
2	Efficiency of Financial Institutions: International Survey and Directions for Future Research (Reprinted with permission from European Journal of Operational Research.)	32
3	Inside the Black Box: What Explains Differences in the Efficiencies of Financial Institutions? (Reprinted with permission from Journal of Banking & Finance.)	93
4	Diversification, Organization, and Efficiency: Evidence from Bank Holding Companies	153
5	Product Focus Versus Diversification: Estimates of X-Efficiency for the U.S. Life Insurance Industry	175
6	REIT Performance: Does Managerial Specialization Pay?	199
7	Bank Relationships: A Review	221
8	Inside the Black Box: What Makes a Bank Efficient?	259
9	An Optimisation Framework of the Triad: Source Capabilities, Customer Satisfaction, and Performance	312
10	Disentangling Within- and Between-Country Efficiency Differences of Bank Branches	336
11	The Challenges of the New Electronic Technologies in Banking: Private Strategies and Public Policies	367
12	Technological Change, Financial Innovation, and Financial Regulation in the U.S.: The Challenges for Public Policy	388
13	The Effects of Entry Restrictions on Bank Performance in the United States	416
14	Risks and Returns in Relationship and Transactional Banks: Evidence from Banks' Returns in Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.	443
15	Acceptable Risk: A Study of Global Currency Trading Rooms in the U.S. and Japan	462
	Index	496

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Macrojustice: The Political Economy of Fairness

Author: Serge Christoph Kolm

The main features of the just society, as they would be chosen by the unanimous, impartial, and fully informed judgment of its members, present a remarkable and simple meaningful structure. In this society, individuals' freedom is full respected, and redistribution amounts to an equal sharing of individuals' different earnings obtained by the same limited "equalization labour." This also amounts to general balanced reciprocity, where each individual yields to each other the proceeds of the same labour. The concept of equalization labour is a measure of the degree of community, solidarity, reciprocity, redistribution, and equalization of the under consideration. It is determined by a number of methods presented in this study, which also emphasizes the rationality, meanings, properties, and ways of practical implementation of this optimum distribution. This result is compared with various distributive principles found in practice and in political, philosophical, and economic thinking, with the conclusion that most can have their proper specific scope of application. The analytical presentation of the social ethics of economics is particularly enlightening. Serge-Christophe Kolm is the author of more than thirty books and several hundred professional articles concerning, notably, normative economics, public economics, macroeconomics, social change, and political psychological philosophy. He is Professor and Director at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.