Educational institutions worldwide are increasingly the subject of analyses aimed at defining, measuring and improving efficiency. However, despite the importance of efficiency measurement in education, it is only relatively recently that the more advanced econometric and mathematical programming frontier techniques have been applied to primary and secondary schools, university departments and degree programmes, and universities as a whole. This paper attempts to provide a synoptic survey of the comparatively few empirical analyses in education using frontier efficiency measurement techniques. Both the measurement of inefficiency in education and the determinants of educational efficiency are examined.

This note tests for the presence of a stable long-run relationship between the price of gold and inflation in the United States from 1945 to 2006 and from 1973 to 2006. Since both the gold market and the inflationary regime have been subjected to structural change over time, a novel unit root testing procedure is employed which allows for the timing of significant breaks to be estimated, rather than assumed exogenous. After taking these breaks into account, a modified cointegration approach provides strong evidence of a cointegrating relationship between gold and inflation in the post-war period and since the early 1970s. The results lend support to the widely held view that direct and indirect gold investment can serve as an effective inflationary hedge.

The ‘competition–stability/fragility’ nexus is one of the more debated issues in the banking literature. However, while there is ample evidence concerning the relationship between competition and stability/fragility in different countries and regions, no prior study investigates this in the context of Islamic and conventional banks. We do this using data on both types of banks drawn from 16 developing economies over the period 2000–12. We measure the lack of competition using the Lerner index, and stability using both accounting-based measures, comprising the Z-score and the nonperforming loan ratio, and market-based measures, including Merton's distance to default. We employ panel vector autoregression and two-stage quantile regression to estimate the relationship. Our results lend support to the competition–fragility hypothesis in both Islamic and conventional banks. We also find the magnitude of the market power effect on stability is greater for conventional banks than Islamic banks. Lastly, banks in the median quantile of stability have a greater ability to reduce credit risk through gaining market power than banks in the lower and upper quantiles.Full Tex