2,293 research outputs found
Banking performance and technological change in non-core EU countries: A study of Spain and Portugal
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the cost efficiency of banks
operating in two "non-core" EU countries, Portugal and Spain, over a number of
years. Specifically, the paper aims to examine the extent to which banks'
efficiency is influenced by their portfolio orientation and scale of operation.
Data envelopment analysis is used to identify banks' levels of performance over
time in both countries. In order to decompose banks' total factor productivity
change into technological, scale efficiency and pure efficiency changes, the
Malmquist index method is applied. Banks operating in both countries have
improved their performance over time and savings banks and large banks, in
particular, have tended to outperform other types of banks. Banks operating in
Spain tend to perform better than in Portugal and Spanish-owned banks perform
better than their Portuguese-owned counterparts. The improvements in performance
revealed have mainly been due to technological change. Bankscope is a well-
respected data source and has been the basis of many studies of performance in
international banking. Unfortunately, owing to data deficiencies, around 20 per
cent of the banks operating in Portugal and Spain were not included. Practical
implications - If Portuguese banks are to be competitive internationally, there
is considerable need for efficiency improvements. The paper provides insights
into the dynamics of the Portuguese and Spanish banking systems. The results
should be of interest to management in banking and bank regulators in Europe,
and economists and others studying bank performance trends. The research
reported may shed light on some of the challenges facing the banking sectors of
the "new" EU states (such as Poland and Hungary)
Testing for international financial markets integration
This paper examines the extent to which financial markets across the main international financial centres integrated between 1988 and 2001 in the face of technological change and capital market liberalisation. Two empirical approaches are adopted based on principal components analysis and cointegration tests, applied respectively to covered interest rate differentials and real interest rates.. The results suggest that some financial integration occurred during the 1990s but that integration is far from complete at the international level. The study also confirms differing trends in the integration of financial markets in different geographical regions.School of Managemen
Challenges Facing the Polish Banking Industry: A Comparative Study with UK Banks
In 2004 Poland entered the EU. This paper investigates the performance of the Polish banking industry over the period 1999–2004, by looking specifically at its comparative efficiency in relation to one of the largest banking sectors in the EU namely, that of the UK. Based on a range of efficiency measures, the empirical results reveal a surprising degree of relative efficiency in the Polish banking industry, no doubt reflecting the substantial economic changes introduced in Poland since 1989. The findings suggest that the Polish banking sector should be able to withstand the new competitive pressures that it faces following entry into the banking sector of the EU.Poland, UK, banking, efficiency, performance
Probing the effect of gravitational microlensing on the measurements of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect
In general, in the studies of transit light-curves and the
Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM), the contribution of the planet's gravitational
microlensing is neglected. Theoretical studies, have, however shown that the
planet's microlensing can affect the transit light-curve and in some extreme
cases cause the transit depth to vanish. In this letter, we present the results
of our quantitative analysis of microlening on the RM effect. Results indicate
that for massive planets in on long period orbits, the planet's microlensing
will have considerable contribution to the star's RV measurements. We present
the details of our study, and discuss our analysis and results.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy &
Astrophysic
Impact of stellar companions on precise radial velocities
Context: With the announced arrival of instruments such as ESPRESSO one can
expect that several systematic noise sources on the measurement of precise
radial velocity will become the limiting factor instead of photon noise. A
stellar companion within the fiber is such a possible noise source. Aims: With
this work we aim at characterizing the impact of a stellar companion within the
fiber to radial velocity measurements made by fiber-fed spectrographs. We
consider the contaminant star either to be part of a binary system whose
primary star is the target star, or as a background/foreground star. Methods:
To carry out our study, we used HARPS spectra, co-added the target with
contaminant spectra, and then compared the resulting radial velocity with that
obtained from the original target spectrum. We repeated this procedure and used
different tunable knobs to reproduce the previously mentioned scenarios.
Results: We find that the impact on the radial velocity calculation is a
function of the difference between individual radial velocities, of the
difference between target and contaminant magnitude, and also of their spectral
types. For the worst-case scenario in which both target and contaminant star
are well centered on the fiber, the maximum contamination for a G or K star may
be higher than 10 cm/s, on average, if the difference between target and
contaminant magnitude is < 10, and higher than 1 m/s if <
8. If the target star is of spectral type M, < 8 produces the same
contamination of 10 cm/s, and a contamination may be higher than 1 m/sComment: Accepted for publication in A&A on 29/12/2019 - 14 page
Existence criteria for stabilization from the scaling behaviour of ionization probabilities
We provide a systematic derivation of the scaling behaviour of various
quantities and establish in particular the scale invariance of the ionization
probability. We discuss the gauge invariance of the scaling properties and the
manner in which they can be exploited as consistency check in explicit
analytical expressions, in perturbation theory, in the Kramers-Henneberger and
Floquet approximation, in upper and lower bound estimates and fully numerical
solutions of the time dependent Schroedinger equation. The scaling invariance
leads to a differential equation which has to be satisfied by the ionization
probability and which yields an alternative criterium for the existence of
atomic bound state stabilization.Comment: 12 pages of Latex, one figur
The quantum brachistochrone problem for non-Hermitian Hamiltonians
Recently Bender, Brody, Jones and Meister found that in the quantum brachistochrone problem the passage time needed for the evolution of certain initial states into specified final states can be made arbitrarily small, when the time-evolution operator is taken to be non-Hermitian but PT-symmetric. Here we demonstrate that such phenomena can also be obtained for non-Hermitian Hamiltonians for which PT-symmetry is completely broken, i.e. dissipative systems. We observe that the effect of a tunable passage time can be achieved by projecting between orthogonal eigenstates by means of a time-evolution operator associated with a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. It is not essential that this Hamiltonian is PT-symmetric
Solar analogs with and without planets: T trends and galactic evolution
We explore a sample of 148 solar-like stars to search for a possible
correlation between the slopes of the abundance trends versus condensation
temperature (known as the Tc slope) both with stellar parameters and Galactic
orbital parameters in order to understand the nature of the peculiar chemical
signatures of these stars and the possible connection with planet formation. We
find that the Tc slope correlates at a significant level with the stellar age
and the stellar surface gravity. We also find tentative evidence that the Tc
slope correlates with the mean galactocentric distance of the stars (Rmean),
suggesting that stars that originated in the inner Galaxy have fewer refractory
elements relative to the volatile ones. We found that the chemical
peculiarities (small refractory-to-volatile ratio) of planet-hosting stars is
probably a reflection of their older age and their inner Galaxy origin. We
conclude that the stellar age and probably Galactic birth place are key to
establish the abundances of some specific elements.Comment: Proceedings of the GREAT-ITN conference: The Milky Way Unravelled by
Gaia. Will be published in the "EAS Publications Series
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