In this dissertation, I analyze the effects of competition in education markets. In my first essay, I analyze the effects of different concentration measures on school personnel salaries. I find evidence that principals have more bargaining power over their salaries than teachers in Washington that through rent-sharing, principals start getting positive returns from increasing concentration at lower levels of concentration than that of teachers. Moreover, I present that the pattern of teacher salaries versus concentration in Washington is similar to that in Texas, but the inflection point in Washington is at substantially lower levels of concentration-a finding which can be attributed to Washington's being a union state versus Texas's being a right-to-work-state. In my second essay, I examine the effects of various measures of competition on school district cost inefficiency in a stochastic frontier framework. My results show that cost frontier is U-shaped in Texas with large positive returns to the scale over a relatively big range and mild diseconomies of scale over an extended range. In addition, I find that school district cost inefficiency increases significantly when market concentration increases. Furthermore, I present the competitive effect/scale effect trade-off through a couple of simulation exercises. The findings from both of my studies show that the effects of competition are barely sensitive to measuring the competition with different sets of relevant competitors. On the other hand, sensitivity of the effects of competition to using different definitions of the education markets is significant. Yet, the range of these estimated effects is relatively small, and the sign and the significance of the effect of competition generally do not change when a meaningful definition of education markets is employed to measure concentration. Furthermore, I present that the concentration measures employed in my essays are endogenous. I control for the endogeneity with several instrumental variables including degrees of lagged educational outputs in the neighboring schools, lagged education market characteristics, and counts of streams. My results imply that the hypothesized effects of competition may be underestimated due to the endogeneity. While the plausibility of competitive effect's being underestimated bolsters the importance of the competitive effects I find, it also strengthens my criticism of using uni-dimensional concentration indices as indicators of competition in the education markets.

This thesis documents, using an unbalanced panel of Top 1000 World banks with observations for 2005 - 2009, three main aspects related to cost and profit efficiency in banking. First, it established that there is no correlation between a bank's rank in the Top and its rank given by the efficiency scores. However, the size of the banks plays a positive role on the cost efficiency of the institution, big banks having higher cost efficiencies than small banks. Conversely, the profit efficiency is equal across different sizes. Second, it verified that for 2005 - 2009 there is no evidence that banks from the developed countries are more efficient than banks from emerging economies. This finding is further supported by the third aspect, which shows that banks originating in the developed economies, with large exposures to more sophisticated banking products, have been hit the hardest by the financial crisis. However the banks managed to shrink their cost inefficiency while losing efficiency on the revenue side. The post crisis, 2009, proved to be a year in which banks across countries and regions converged in terms of efficiency and plateaued at about 10% and 25% for cost and profit inefficiency respectively.