multinational operation ownership and efficiency differences in the international oil industry abstract although state involvement in market systems often leads to inefficiency this influence in the oil industry is not dwindling due to strong growth of some state oil companies based on this background there are concerns about how state firms can continue to stay relevant in the international oil industry by offsetting inefficiencies due to state control this study assesses the effects of multinational operations on the performance of oil firms this is achieved by comparing productive and scale efficiencies of state and private oil companies as well as state multinationals and private multinationals a dataset of 50 firms each year from 2001 to 2010 reveals that although multinational operation is important in reducing productive inefficiencies of state firms it does not mitigate scale inefficiencies of state owned firms state firms should therefore make multinational operations a key policy direction since this will provide a transformative agenda towards equally competing with their private counterparts however better efforts need to be paid in reducing scale inefficiencies that are pervasive among state owned oil firms providing better controls on firm size will provide better drive towards future efficient production levels

international comparisons of productivity and its determinants in the natural gas industry the objective of this paper was to evaluate the performance of the natural gas industry using an inter country comparison of productivity level and its determinants three method ologies multilateral tornqvist productivity analysis managerial index system analysis and non parametric efficiency analysis are employed to make a methodological cross checking and to perform diversified analysis from the empirical results we identified the level and growth rate of productivity of individual firms the results also indicated that the korean gas industry has shown a relatively low level of productivity from the results of managerial performance index analysis we found that during the recent years of regulatory changes the final price of gas has decreased dramatically while the productivity growth has not been enough to offset the effect of decreased output price which has resulted in decreased profit we also examine the extent of the allocative scale and managerial efficiency as source components of the overall efficiency based on the performance of best practiced with the results of this study an effective policy measure could be established to improve the productivity and the overall managerial performance in the natural gas industry q 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

marginal rate of transformation and rate of substitution measured by dea environmental assessment comparison among european and north american nations this study discusses the new use of dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment to measure mrt marginal rate of transformation and rs rate of substitution among production factors e g inputs desirable and undesirable outputs to measure the degree on mrt and rs this study first examines a concept of disposability from the perspective of economic strategies to combat various environmental issues the strategies are extendable to a policy change for pollution prevention the underlying concept is separated into natural and managerial disposability under managerial disposability it is possible for us to measure an occurrence of desirable congestion or eco technology innovation considering the disposability concept this study discusses how to measure the type and magnitude of mrt and rs a problem of the mrt rs measurement is that these measures usually become unstable e g very large or small in these magnitudes because dea does not assume any functional form for economic activities to overcome such a difficulty this study equips dea environmental assessment with multiplier restriction by utilizing a unique feature on a proposed data treatment the multiplier restriction in dea has been never explored in previous works on environmental assessment in an application this study finds three important economic concerns on europe and north america first western europe outperforms eastern europe and north america in their unified efficiency measures under managerial disposability this study statistically confirms a difference between western and eastern europe but not between western europe and north america this result exhibits that eastern europe is not yet well developed at the level of the other two regions second eastern europe has exhibited mrt estimates that are different from western europe and north america the nations in eastern europe have an economic potential for industrial developments because the level of their industrial pollutions is less than that of the other two regions the potential is also found in their mrt estimates finally an interesting difference can be found in the rs estimate between eastern europe and western europe from 2008 to 2012 they have statistically exhibited a difference between the two regimes but not with north america this is because most nations in both western europe and north america have already attained a high level of economic successes so that they have a limited industrial potential under current production technology and eco technology the situation of the two regions will be changed along with new technology development in contrast eastern europe is different from the other two regions in terms of attaining such a level of social sustainability because of limited capital accumulation and limited opportunity for technology innovation

affirmative action or just discrimination a study on the endogenous emergence of quotas affirmative action rules are often implemented to promote women on labor markets little is known however about how and whether such rules emerge endogenously in groups of potentially affected subjects we experimentally investigate whether subjects vote for affirmative action rules against or abstain if approved by the vote a quota rule is implemented that favors women in one treatment but members of an artificially created group based on random color assignment in another treatment we find that quota rules based on gender are implemented frequently and do not affect the performance of men and women in a contest quota rules based on an arbitrary criterion however are less often approved and lead to strong individual reactions of advantaged and disadvantaged group members and to efficiency losses these results show that the effects of affirmative action policies largely depend on whether these policies are viewed favorably within the affected groups

a non radial dea approach to measuring environmental performance data envelopment analysis dea has gained great popularity in environmental performance measurement because it can provide a synthetic standardized environmental performance index when pollutants are suitably incorporated into the traditional dea framework past studies about the application of dea to environmental performance measurement often follow the concept of radial efficiency measures in this paper we present a non radial dea approach to measuring environmental performance which consists of a non radial dea based model for multilateral environmental performance comparisons and a non radial malmquist environmental performance index for modeling the change of environmental performance over time a case study of oecd countries using the proposed non radial dea approach is also presented it is found that the environmental performance of oecd countries as a whole has been improved from 1995 to 1997

structural change in europe s gas markets three scenarios for the development of the european gas market to 2020 abstract against the background of the european union s gas directive and the emergence of new players and markets in europe s gas sector this paper explores how company actions could shape the future for the gas industry starting with an examination of company strategies this paper develops three scenarios for the future a gradual transformation scenario where a single european gas market develops that is essentially oligopolistic in nature a vertical integration scenario where upstream and downstream gas companies merge to form a vertically integrated gas supplier and a pull the plug scenario where the current market structure decomposes into a competitive market these scenarios are examined in terms of their impact on gas prices demand and the distribution of gas rent along the supply chain the paper highlights the fact that the eu s gas directive is not sufficient for the introduction of competition into europe s gas markets but that company actions will be the key determinant and they may favour alternative market structures

performance pay competitiveness and the gender wage gap evidence from the united states we show that women in the nlsy79 and nlsy97 are less likely than men to receive competitive compensation the portion of the gender wage gap explained by compensation schemes is small in the nlsy79 but somewhat larger in the nlsy97

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

frontier production functions and technical efficiency measures the concept of technical efficiency is central to measuring the firm performance the measurement of technical efficiency has proved difficult and complex and the literature provides a range of methodologies this paper reviews the various methodologies for measuring technical efficiency and offers a comparison between established methods of measurements the discussion is literary with less mathematical jargons and equations the objective of this paper is not to be exhaustive but to be up to date and to provide a significant discussion on some of the core methods of measuring technical efficiency

efficiency and performance in gas distribution evidence from brazil this article analyses the current state of the gas distribution industry in brazil by identifying the main factors that determine its efficiency in order to test the performance of the industry we have calculated the firms technical efficiency during the period 2001 2009 we analyse whether some economic and technological factors as consumer density load factor or regulation among others have affected the performance of this industry we show that companies serving markets with different customer characteristics diversification have reached higher levels of efficiency and evolved faster moreover the private ownership and price cap regulation are more efficient in relation to public ownership and cost of service regulation these findings are important to support the improvement of the regulation of gas distribution in the brazilian states

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

how uncertainty and ambiguity in tournaments affect gender differences in competitive behavior abstract tournament incentives prevail in labor markets yet the number of tournament winners is often unclear to competitors while it is hard to measure how this uncertainty affects work performance and willingness to compete in the field it can be studied in a controlled lab experiment we present a novel experiment where subjects can compete against each other but the number of winners is either uncertain but with known probabilities or ambiguous with unknown probabilities for different numbers of winners we compare these two conditions to a control treatment with a known number of winners we find that ambiguity induces a significant increase in the performance of men who choose to compete while we observe no change for women men also increase their willingness to enter competition in the presence of ambiguity overall both effects contribute to men winning the tournament significantly more often than women under uncertainty and ambiguity these findings suggest that management should make tournament conditions transparent and information available in order to prevent gender disparities from increasing under uncertainty and ambiguity

malmquist indices of productivity change in the uk gas industry before and after privatization the uk government s privatization programme was justified in terms of potential efficiency gains this paper concentrates on measures of technical efficiency in the regions of the uk natural gas industry before and after privatization and the associated regulatory changes it uses non parametric frontier analysis and malmquist indices to show that the rate of productivity growth increased significantly after privatization however the differences in technical efficiency amongst regions remain suggesting that failure to break up the industry has sacrificed potential gains from direct competition or indirect competition through yardstick regulation

prospects for the eurozone for wim duisenberg the euro s perceived independence from the nation state was a path breaking achievement to be proud of and to cherish little more than a decade later and three years into the deepest economic crisis europe has known since the great depression duisenberg s elation rings strangely anachronistic since what the nationless euro seems to have achieved above all is to undermine whatever mutual confidence at the heart of our community there may have been at the start this special issue takes stock of the euro crisis so far it is concerned with the in depth analysis of its main causes policy proposals for a recovery from the crisis and reform strategies for the reconstruction of a more viable and egalitarian eurozone in the future this introduction provides an overview of both core features of the euro crisis and related debates as well as individual contributions to this special issue section 1 examines the origins of the euro crisis section 2 reviews key policy developments in the evolution of the crisis from its onset in may 2010 to the adoption of outright monetary transactions omts by the european central bank ecb in september 2012 and section 3 provides an overview of the contributions to the special issue

restructuring the hong kong gas industry in july 1995 the consumer council of hong kong published a report on the gas industry in hong kong the report attacked the non interventionist and safety policies of the government as having helped the town gas monopolist to earn excessive profits to the detriment of its customers the report proposed a restructuring of the gas industry with an aim of introducing competition into the industry this paper discusses the structure and performance of the energy industry in hong kong outlining the major proposals of the consumer council and its methodology pitfalls based on the experiences of industry restructuring in the usa and uk the author provides an alternative approach to restructuring the gas industry in hong kong

at the crossroads the euro and its central bank guardian and saviour this paper investigates the role of the european central bank ecb in the mal functioning of europe s economic and monetary union emu focusing on the german intellectual and historical traditions behind the euro policy regime and its central bank guardian the analysis contrasts keynes s chartalist conception of money and central banking with the peculiar post world war ii german traditions nourished by the bundesbank and based on a fear of fiscal dominance keynes viewed the central bank as an instrument of the state controlling the financial system and wider economy but ultimately an integral part of and controlled by the state in contrast the maastricht emu regime of german design positions the central bank as controlling the state essentially the national success of the bundesbank model in pre emu times has left europe stuck with a policy regime that is wholly unsuitable for the area as a whole but regime reform is complicated by severely unbalanced competitiveness positions and debt overhang legacies refocusing the ecb on growth and price stability would have to be a part of any solution as would refocusing area wide fiscal policy on growth and investment copyright oxford university press

a theory of yardstick competition in the typical regulatory scheme a franchised monopoly has little incentive to reduce costs this article proposes a mechanism in which the price the regulatedfirm receives depends on the costs of identical firms in equilibrium each firm chooses a socially efficient level of cost reduction the mechanism generalizes to cover heterogeneous firms with observable differences medicare s prospective reimbursement of hospitals by using diagnostically related groups is a scheme very similar to the one outlined here

efficiency gains in danish district heating is there anything to learn from benchmarking abstract facing a market structure of independent heating systems and cost of service regulation the regulator considers ways to create incentives for increasing efficiency in heat production one way is to implement benchmark regulation the aim of this paper is twofold 1 to investigate the potential for increasing productivity in danish district heating production and 2 to examine whether benchmarking has a role to play using data envelopment analysis our analyses show that by assuming variable returns to scale a potential exists to reduce production costs by 5 27 depending on the portfolio of inputs and outputs included in the model further our analyses show that the ranking of producers is much dependent on the combination of inputs and outputs included in the model therefore great care should be taken when deciding on the appropriate model to be used when implementing benchmarking as a regulatory mean

performance pay and wage inequality an increasing fraction of jobs in the u s labor market explicitly pay workers for their performance using bonus pay commissions or piece rate contracts using data from the panel study of income dynamics we show that compensation in performance pay jobs is more closely tied to both observed and unobserved productive characteristics of workers than compensation in non performance pay jobs we also find that the return to these productive characteristics increased faster over time in performance pay than in non performance pay jobs we show that this finding is consistent with the view that underlying changes in returns to skill due for instance to technological change induce more firms to offer performance pay contracts and result in more wage inequality among workers who are paid for performance thus performance pay provides a channel through which underlying changes in returns to skill get translated into higher wage inequality we conclude that this channel accounts for 21 of the growth in the variance of male wages between the late 1970s and the early 1990s and for most of the increase in wage inequality above the eightieth percentile over the same period

the assessment macroeconomic policy after emu in this paper we discuss the emergence of the new european macroeconomic structure within emu we focus on three important elements the wage fixing authorities in each country the fiscal authorities in each country and the single european central bank ecb we identify serious problems which might arise in coordinating both the wage setters and the fiscal authorities and argue that these problems could be exacerbated if the ecb conducts monetary policy inappropriately in the light of this we provide recommendations for the conduct of monetary policy by the ecb the paper also briefly discusses financial stability issues and the interaction between the countries in emu and the rest of the world copyright 1998 by oxford university press

gender competitiveness and career choices gender differences in competitiveness have been hypothesized as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes we examine the predictive power of a standard laboratory experimental measure of competitiveness for the later important choice of academic track of secondary school students in the netherlands although boys and girls display similar levels of academic ability boys choose substantially more prestigious academic tracks where more prestigious tracks are more math and science intensive our experimental measure shows that boys are also substantially more competitive than girls we find that competitiveness is strongly positively correlated with choosing more prestigious academic tracks even conditional on academic ability most important we find that the gender difference in competitiveness accounts for a substantial portion about 20 of the gender difference in track choice

on the impossibility of central bank independence four decades of time and intellectual inconsistency the intellectual justification for modern central banking time inconsistency celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2017 alongside the cambridge journal of economics however the key progeny of the time inconsistency literature central bank independence has fundamental flaws that have been thus far neglected in mainstream research in the first instance the argument for independence relies on a utilitarian rather than institutional analysis one that neglects the genesis of central banks and their relation to other institutions within a country second central bank independence neglects the complex interdependencies of the global monetary and financial system applying an institutional lens to the concept of central bank independence i conclude that independence fails under the reality of globalization as much as it does in a domestic context with central banks reliant on all manner of political institutions they are never really independent operationally or in terms of policy

efficiency performance and regulation of the international gas industry a bootstrap dea approach abstract natural gas has become increasingly important as a source of energy in recent years it is widely viewed as an attractive means of realizing environmental objectives post kyoto and individual country gas industries have been extensively restructured to encourage investment from the private sector barriers to international trade in gas have fallen particularly in areas such as europe and asia as pipeline facilities have expanded and trading systems have become established an important question for policy makers concerns the use of scarce resources by this expanding industry regulatory authorities increasingly use efficiency comparators to incentivise minimum cost use of resources by price cap methods yardstick competition and other techniques this paper explores some of the policy developments which affect efficiency of resource use in the gas industry and uses data envelopment analysis to measure relative performance at the individual country level recent developments in bootstrapping techniques are used to correct efficiency estimates for bias and to assess the uncertainty surrounding such estimates the implications of these results for regulatory authorities are then explored

performance in competitive environments gender differences even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries large gender differences prevail in competitive high ranking positions suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital in this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor women may be less effective than men in competitive environments even if they are able to perform similarly in non competitive environments in a laboratory experiment we observe as we increase the competitiveness of the environment a significant increase in performance for men but not for women this results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate this effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single sex competitive environments this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se

understanding the gender pay gap what s competition got to do with it a number of researchers have argued that men and women have different attitudes toward and behavioral responses to competition that is women are more likely to opt out of jobs in which performance pay is the norm and to under perform in some competitive situations laboratory experiments suggest that these gender differences are rather large to check these hypotheses and findings against differences in the field the authors use performance pay as an indicator of competition in the workplace and compare the gender gap not only in incidence of performance pay but also in earnings and work effort under these contracts they find that although women are less likely than men to work under performance pay contracts the gender gap is small furthermore the effect of performance pay on earnings is modest and does not differ markedly by gender consequently the authors argue the ability of these competition hypotheses to explain the gender pay gap seems very limited