Mexico's commercial banks had been nationalized in 1982 under the presidential administration of Jose Lopez Portillo. Under the administration of Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (1982-8), so-called nonbank functions of the bank were allowed to be performed by private sector institutions. The 1991-92 privatizations of the Carlos Salinas de Gortari administration (1988-94) were part of a series of radical reforms in the financial services industry that actually began in 1987 during the de la Madrid Hurtado administration (1982-88). 2 At the time of the nationalization of the Mexican commercial banking system in 1982, there had been 60 Mexican banks, of which 58 were nationalized. In order to capture perceived economies of scale, Mexico reorganized the commercial banking industry-merging the 58 commercial state-owned banks into just 18. Although the industry had been consolidating prior to 1982 in any case, these new mergers represented a significant increase in industry concentration. Indeed, at the time of privatization, the three largest banks accounted for nearly three-fifths of total assets in the commercial banking system, while the three largest U.S. banking organizations at that time held about one-seventh of U.S. commercial bank assets. "Mr. Pereguna...suggests that after privatisation in 1991-92 most banks abandoned common sense in a race to sign up customers and expand their credit base." Financial Times, London Edition. October 15, 1996 A major theme in the literature of privatization is that the benefits are much abridged if a government monopoly is simply replaced by a private sector monopoly or oligopoly (Hanson, 1994). Variations on this theme surfaced in many discussions of Mexico's bank privatization of 1991-1992, in which controlling interests in Mexico's 18 government-owned commercial banks were sold to financial groups-chiefly organizations that already dominated the nation's securities industry. 1 A near-universal concern was that years might pass between when Mexico's banking system was privatized and when its performance might approach most standards of competitiveness. Although Mansell Carstens (1993) argued that privatization would raise some measures of efficiency, she also suggested that spreads between banks' cost of funds and interest rates on loans could remain high for years-in part because the high degree of oligopoly power in the provision of bank services would likely continue. 2 Bazdresch and Warneck (1994) developed similar themes and-consistent with other authors-viewed Mexico's high interest rate margins as indicative of anti-competitive market power. An important reason for many observers' pessimism about competition in Mexican banking was the market's heavy concentration. Gavito, Sánchez and Trigueros (1992) developed the anti-competitive implications of concentration in the Mexican commercial banking system while Gavito and Trigueros (1993) argued that "some additional measures would be useful to induce greater competition" in it.

If localization economies are present, firms within denser industry concentrations should exhibit higher levels of performance than more isolated firms. Nevertheless, research in industrial organization that has focused on the influences on firm survival has largely ignored the potential effects from agglomeration. Recent studies in urban and regional economics suggest that agglomeration effects may be very localized. Analyses of industry concentration at the MSA or county-level may fail to detect important elements of intra-industry firm interaction that occur at the sub-MSA level. Using a highly detailed dataset on firm locations and characteristics for Texas, this paper analyses agglomeration effects on firm survival over geographic areas as small as a single mile radius. We find that greater firm density within very close proximity (within 1 mile) of firms in the same industry increases mortality rates while greater concentration over larger distances reduces mortality rates.

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The shift toward renewable forms of energy for electricity generation in the electricity generation industry has clear implications for the spatial distribution of generating plant. Traditional forms of generation are typically located close to the load or population centers, while wind and solar-powered generation must be located where the energy source is found. In the case of wind, this has meant signi…cant new investment in wind plant in primarily rural areas that have been in secular economic decline. This paper investigates the localized economic impacts of the rapid increase in wind power capacity at the county level in Texas. Unlike Input-Output impact analysis that relies primarily on levels of inputs to estimate gross impacts, we use traditional econometric methods to estimate net localized impacts in terms of employment, personal income, property tax base, and key public school expenditure levels. While we …nd evidence that both direct and indirect employment impacts are modest, signi…cant increases in per capita income accompany wind power development. County and school property tax rolls also realize important bene…ts from the local siting of utility scale wind power although peculiarities in Texas school funding shift localized property tax bene…ts to the state.JEL Classi…cation: H23, H72, Q42, Q48, R11.

If localized knowledge spillovers are present in the university setting, higher rates of both start-up and/or survival would be observed in areas that are geographically proximate to the university. Using a detailed industry data set for Texas for 1999:3-2005:2, we analyze start-up and exit rates for high-tech firms. Based on a Poisson quasimaximum likelihood estimation, we find evidence that the level of R&D and proximity of a research institution positively affects the likelihood of technology start-ups. However, using both the Cox proportional hazards model and Kaplan-Meier approach, our results suggest that geographic proximity to knowledge centers does not reduce hazard rates. (JEL R12, R53, O18)