The Eficiency Effects of Bank Mergers and Acquisitions in a Developing Economy: Evidence from Malaysia

This paper utilises the non-parametric frontier approach, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), to analyse the technical and scale efficiency of domestic incorporated Malaysian commercial banks during the merger year, pre-and post merger period. We found that Malaysian banks have exhibit a commendable overall efficiency level of 95.9% during 1998-2003 hence suggesting minimal input waste of 4.1%. Our results suggest that the merger programme was successful, particularly for the small and medium size banks, which have benefited the most from the merger and expansion via economies of scale. On the other hand our results suggest that the larger banks should shrink to benefit from scale advantages. Decision-makers hence ought to be more cautious in promoting mergers as a means to enjoying efficiency gains.Finance and Banking, Mergers, Efficiency Change, Data Envelopment Analysis; Malaysia

Sources of Productivity Changes of Commercial Banks in Developing Economy: Evidence from Malaysia, 1998-2003

Applying a non-parametric Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) method, this paper attempts to investigate the productivity changes of Malaysian banks during the post crisis period of 1998-2003. Our results suggest that: (1) Malaysian banking sector have exhibit productivity regress of 6.3% and that the productivity regressed during the period of study was largely attributed to Technological (6.1%) rather than Technical Efficiency (0.2%) regress. (2) Malaysian banks regardless of size have exhibit productivity regress ranging from 1.5% to as high as 10.0% and (3) The smallest bank in our sample is too small to reap the benefits of economies of scale, while the largest bank in our sample, is too large to be scale efficient.Finance and Banking, Productivity Change, Malmquist Productivity Index

On the Efficacy of Live DDoS Detection with Hadoop

Distributed Denial of Service flooding attacks are one of the biggest challenges to the availability of online services today. These DDoS attacks overwhelm the victim with huge volume of traffic and render it incapable of performing normal communication or crashes it completely. If there are delays in detecting the flooding attacks, nothing much can be done except to manually disconnect the victim and fix the problem. With the rapid increase of DDoS volume and frequency, the current DDoS detection technologies are challenged to deal with huge attack volume in reasonable and affordable response time. In this paper, we propose HADEC, a Hadoop based Live DDoS Detection framework to tackle efficient analysis of flooding attacks by harnessing MapReduce and HDFS. We implemented a counter-based DDoS detection algorithm for four major flooding attacks (TCP-SYN, HTTP GET, UDP and ICMP) in MapReduce, consisting of map and reduce functions. We deployed a testbed to evaluate the performance of HADEC framework for live DDoS detection. Based on the experiments we showed that HADEC is capable of processing and detecting DDoS attacks in affordable time

Workers’ Remittances and Growth in MENA Labor Exporting Countries

This paper presents an empirical examination of effects of workers’ remittance on economic growth in a sample of 7 remittance-receiving MENA countries. In order to empirically analyze the impact of remittances we estimate growth equations using a set of 7 MENA labor exporting countries during the period 1975-2006. A standard growth models are estimated using both fixed-effects and random effects models. The empirical results show the support of the fixed –effects method as the random effects model is rejected in statistical tests. The results show the support for the view that remittances have a positive impact on growth both directly and indirectly through their interactions with financial and institutional channels.Remittances, Economic Growth, Panel Data, Fixed effects, MENA Countries