Économies d’échelle dans les opérations des caisses populaires du district de Québec

The application of the computer to the servicing of deposit accounts at banks and non-bank financial intermediaries is a fairly recent development. Most empirical studies of economies of scale in this industry date prior to this technological transition. There is one notable exception, however, and that is the study by D. L. Daniel, W. A. Longbrake and N. B. Murphy (1972), in which they reported economies of scale in the servicing of checking deposits for computerized banks, especially when the number of such accounts exceeds the 10,600 mark. The present study examines the issue for a different type of computer-using deposit institution, namely: a sample of 128 Canadian Credit Unions located in the district of Quebec and referred to as the "Caisses Populaires" (C.P.'s). These institutions were chosen for the study because they present some unique characteristics and also because they were among the first Canadian financial institutions to computerize the servicing of their deposit operations.Following G. J. Benston (1970) and F. Bell and N. Murphy (1968), the data has been tested using two different models. The empirical results of both tests indicate that computerization did not generate any economies of scale in the checking deposit accounts. Further analysis reveals that the potential economies of scale were captured by the lessor of the equipment through a financial arrangement tying the rent to the number of cheking accounts to be serviced

Économies d’échelle dans les opérations des caisses populaires du district de Québec

The application of the computer to the servicing of deposit accounts at banks and non-bank financial intermediaries is a fairly recent development. Most empirical studies of economies of scale in this industry date prior to this technological transition. There is one notable exception, however, and that is the study by D. L. Daniel, W. A. Longbrake and N. B. Murphy (1972), in which they reported economies of scale in the servicing of checking deposits for computerized banks, especially when the number of such accounts exceeds the 10,600 mark. The present study examines the issue for a different type of computer-using deposit institution, namely: a sample of 128 Canadian Credit Unions located in the district of Quebec and referred to as the "Caisses Populaires" (C.P.'s). These institutions were chosen for the study because they present some unique characteristics and also because they were among the first Canadian financial institutions to computerize the servicing of their deposit operations.

La structure du capital : une synthèse des orientations théoriques et empiriques de la dernière décennie

L’objet de cet article est de présenter une synthèse des plus importantes contributions théoriques et empiriques dans le domaine de la structure financière des entreprises, présentées au cours des dix dernières années. Dans la présentation que nous allons faire, nous chercherons à analyser et à évaluer la pensée financière sur ce thème central au cours des dernières années, et à évoquer les contributions essentielles qui ont marqué ce domaine, dans le but de mieux comprendre les nouvelles orientations de la recherche théorique et empirique touchant l’incidence de la structure financière de l’entreprise sur sa valeur marchande et sur son coût du capital.This paper presents a clear and complete synthesis of the most important theoretical and empirical developments relating to the firm's capital structure in the last decade. Within the confines of this objective, an attempt is made to analyse the discussions surrounding this central theme and to evaluate and to some extent reconcile the conflicting views. The most significant contributions made towards the development of new and more fruitful methods of analysis in the last ten years are also reviewed with a view to simplify and clarify them

Identifier-Based Discovery in Large-Scale Networks

The design of any network mechanism that requires collaboration among selfish agents could only benefit from accounting for the complex social and economic interactions and incentives of the agents using the design. This chapter presents a broad treatment of the main economic issues that arise in the context of identifier-based discovery on large scale networks, particularly on the Internet. An “identified” object (such as a node or service), referred to as a player, demands to be discoverable by the rest of the network on its “identifier”. A discovery scheme provides such a service to the players and incurs a cost for doing so. Providing such a service while accounting for the cost and making sure that the incentives of the players are aligned is the general economic problem that we address in this work. After introducing the identifier-based discovery problem, we present a taxonomy of discovery schemes and proposals based on their business model and we pose several questions that are becoming increasingly important as we proceed to design the inter-network of the future. An incentive model for distributed discovery in the context of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and path-vector protocols in general is then presented. We model BGP route distribution and computation using a game in which a BGP speaker advertises its prefix to its direct neighbors promising them a reward for further distributing the route deeper into the network. The neighbors do the same thing with their direct neighbors, and so on. The result of this cascaded route distribution is a globally advertised prefix and hence discoverability. We present initial results on the existence of equilibria in the game and we motivate our ongoing work

Weighing Neutrinos with Galaxy Cluster Surveys

Large future galaxy cluster surveys, combined with cosmic microwave background observations, can achieve a high sensitivity to the masses of cosmologically important neutrinos. We show that a weak lensing selected sample of ~100,000 clusters could tighten the current upper bound on the sum of masses of neutrino species by an order of magnitude, to a level of 0.03 eV. Since this statistical sensitivity is below the best existing lower limit on the mass of at least one neutrino species, a future detection is likely, provided that systematic errors can be controlled to a similar level.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, version accepted for publication in PR

Comparaison performance-taille des fonds mutuels par une analyse multicritère

L’objet de cette étude est de vérifier si certaines caractéristiques de « risque et de rendement » des fonds mutuels sont clairement reliées à la taille de ces fonds. On se place donc dans un contexte multidimensionnel, où l’on cherche à prendre simultanément en compte les diverses caractéristiques d’un tel placement. Cette vérification est effectuée à l’aide d’une analyse multicritère s’inspirant de la méthode PROMETHEE, laquelle se fonde sur des relations de surclassement.Ce type d’analyse permet également d’expliciter l’impact que peut avoir l’importance relative accordée aux critères, sur la performance des fonds.The purpose of this paper is to verify if some risk-return characteristics of mutual funds are clearly related to their size. Assuming a multidimensional setting where various funds characteristics can be explicitly and simultaneously considered. The paper applies PROMETHEE methodology, based on outranking relations, to make this verification.Such a multicriterion analysis also allows an explicit measure of the impact of the weight given to each criterion on the performance of the funds