does working from home work evidence from a chinese experiment about 10 of us employees now regularly work from home wfh but there are concerns this can lead to shirking from home we report the results of a wfh experiment at ctrip a 16 000 employee nasdaq listed chinese travel agency call center employees who volunteered to wfh were randomly assigned to work from home or in the office for 9 months home working led to a 13 performance increase of which about 9 was from working more minutes per shift fewer breaks and sick days and 4 from more calls per minute attributed to a quieter working environment home workers also reported improved work satisfaction and experienced less turnover but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell due to the success of the experiment ctrip rolled out the option to wfh to the whole firm and allowed the experimental employees to re select between the home or office interestingly over half of them switched which led to the gains from wfh almost doubling to 22 this highlights the benefits of learning and selection effects when adopting modern management practices like wfh

modeling economies of scale the case of us electric power companies modeling and validating the existence of technical progress within the neoclassical production function specification has been facilitated through the translog functional form however attempts to separate out the effects of technical progress and returns to scale has been limited this study develops and presents a model for testing the existence of these two separate effects using data from a sample of us electric power companies the analysis found that for these electric utilities there existed increasing returns to scale and technical progress that was energy using but capital neutral however scale effects were found to be a dominant factor in lessening the impact of declining average productivity

economics of scale versus technological change an aggregate product function for switzerland in estimating a production function for an economy constant returns to scale has been a traditionally maintained hypothesis in modelling switzerland s gross output as a function of labor capital and imports a general functional form is selected which displays increasing returns to scale and is not hicks neutral it is a technology which is labor saving import saving and capital using this paper also quantifies the mismeasurements associated with using a constant returns to scale model to estimate such variables as own elasticities of demand elasticities of substitution impacts on factor income and rate of technical progress

nonstationarity in job search theory generally structural job search models are taken to be stationary in this paper models are examined in which every exogenous variable can cause nonstationarity for instance because its value is dependent on unemployment duration a general differential equation that describes the evolution of the reservation wage over time is derived as an empirical illustration a nonstationary structural model is estimated that focuses on the consequences of a downward shift in the level of benefits it appears that the elasticity of duration with respect to the level of benefits after the shift is much larger than the elasticity with respect to the level before the shift this paper examines the movement of a job seeking individual s reservation wage over time in a general nonstationary job search model also results concerning comparative dynamics of the reservation wage and the distribution of the duration of unemployment are derived as an empirical illustration a nonstationary structural model is estimated the nonstationarity originates from the decrease in the level of benefits when unemployment duration equals two years from the results some detailed policy recommendations can be deduced as one is able to distinguish the effect of a change in the level of benefits in the first two years of unemployment from the effect of a change in the level after that period recently the use of job search models for the analysis of unemployment duration has become widespread the reduced form approach in empirical studies see e g lancaster 1979 in which only the hazard of the duration distribution is estimated is gradually being replaced by a more structural approach the latter way of modelling is characterized by the explicit use in empirical analysis of the reservation wage equation as stated by the theory e g yoon 1981 lancaster and chesher 1983 lynch 1983 narendranathan and nickell 1985 and van den berg 1988 use the complete theoretical framework of job search theory to make inferences about search behaviour however the structural models used in these studies are stationary this implies that variables like unemployment benefits or the rate of arrival of job offers are assumed to be constant over the spell of unemployment which is often at variance with reality what is more various reduced form empirical studies indicate a significant durationdependence of the re employment probability which is generally interpreted as evidence in favour of the presence of nonstationarity see e g blau and robins 1986 kooreman and ridder 1983 lancaster 1979 and narendranathan nickell and stern 1985 consequently there is a need to model reservation wage movements over time based on a nonstationary theoretical framework

parenthood and the gender gap in pay we compare the income and wage trajectories of women to those of their male partners before and after parenthood focusing on the within couple gap allows us to control for both observed and unobserved attributes of the spouse and to estimate both short and long term effects of entering parenthood we find that 15 years after the first child has been born the male female gender gaps in income and wages have increased by 32 and 10 percentage points respectively in line with a collective labor supply model the magnitude of these effects depends on counterfactual relative incomes or wages within the family

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

agglomeration economies and industrial decentralization the wage productivity trade offs abstract this paper examines the industrial location trade offs between the productivity advantages of the metropolitan center and the lower land and the labor costs in outlying regions within the state of sao paulo brazil the results indicate that while plant productivity is enhanced by the considerable agglomeration economies existing within metropolitan sao paulo firms must pay for these benefits in high wages and land costs offsetting labor cost savings can be achieved by locating in outlying regions the evidence presented in this paper suggests that market forces may lead eventually to a spontaneous decentralization of industry

discrimination in an equilibrium search model i construct an equilibrium search model where some employers have a distaste for hiring minority workers and show that this bias results in economic discrimination against minority workers although only unprejudiced firms hire minority workers minority workers receive lower wages than workers not facing discrimination whenever any employers in the market have a distaste for minority workers one implication of the model is that gender or racial wage differentials understate the utility loss from discrimination in addition the wages of minority workers increase when their proportion increases in the labor market

the career costs of children this paper analyzes the life cycle career costs associated with child rearing and decomposes their eects into unearned wages as women drop out of the labor market loss of human capital and selection into more child friendly occupations we estimate a dynamic life cycle model of fertility occupational choice and labor supply using detailed survey and administrative data for germany for numerous birth cohorts across dierent regions we use this model to analyze both the male female wage gap as it evolves from labor market entry onward and the eect of pro fertility policies we show that a substantial portion of the gender wage gap is explainable by realized and expected fertility and that the long run eect of policies encouraging fertility are considerably lower than the short run eects typically estimated in the literature

productivity and efficiency of us gas transmission companies a european regulatory perspective on both sides of the atlantic the regulation of gas transmission networks has undergone major changes since the early 1990s whereas in the us the long standing regime of cost plus regulation was complemented by increasing pipe to pipe competition most european countries moved towards incentive regulation complemented by market integration we study the productivity development of a panel of us interstate companies using data envelopment analysis and malmquist productivity indices results are presented for changes in productivity as well as for several convergence tests the results indicate that taking productivity and convergence as performance indicators regulation has been rather successful in particular during a period where overall demand was flat however we argue that a benchmarking based regulation might have brought about stronger convergence lessons for european regulators are twofold first the us analysis shows that benchmarking of european transmission operators would be possible if data were available second our results suggest that in the long run market integration and competition are alternatives to the current european model

technical efficiency of french nuclear energy plants this article analyses the efficiency of french nuclear energy plants belonging to edf electricity of france from 2004 to 2008 with a dea data envelopment analysis model the convexity model is used to investigate the technical efficiency of a representative sample of nuclear plants the results indicated that some plants have undergone an improvement in technical efficiency while others have regressed in terms of technical efficiency policy implications related to the results are discussed

job search and commuting time we structurally analyze a job search model for unemployed individuals that allows jobs to have different wage commuting time combinations the structural parameter of interest is the degree of willingness to pay for commuting time we use a unique dataset containing responses by unemployed individuals on the optimal search strategy to estimate this parameter without the need to rely on functional form assumptions we address specification errors in the model and measurement errors in the data the results identify types of individuals who have a high disutility of commuting time

do competitive workplaces deter female workers a large scale natural field experiment on job entry decisions an important line of research using laboratory experiments has provided a new potential reason for gender imbalances in labour markets men are more competitively inclined than women whether and to what extent gender differences in attitudes toward competition lead to differences in naturally occurring labour markets remains an open question to examine this we run a natural field experiment on job entry decisions where we randomize almost 9000 job seekers into different compensation regimes by varying the role that individual competition plays in setting the wage and the gender composition we examine whether a competitive compensation regime by itself can cause differential job entry the data highlight the power of the compensation regime in that women disproportionately shy away from competitive work settings yet there are important factors that attenuate the gender differences including whether the job is performed in teams whether the position has overt gender associations and the age of the job seekers we also find that the effect is most pronounced in labour markets with attractive alternative employment options furthermore our results suggest that preferences over uncertainty can be just as important as preferences over competition per se in driving job entry choices

labor supply hours constraints and job mobility if hours can be freely varied within jobs the effect on hours of changes in preferences for those who do change jobs should be similar to the effect on hours for those who do not change jobs conversely if employers restrict hours choices then changes in preferences should affect hours more strongly when the job changes than when it does not change for a sample of married women we find that changes in many of the labor supply preference variables produce much larger effects on hours when the job changes

the role of ports in the making of major cities self agglomeration and hub effect this paper proposes an evolutionary model of spatial economic development in which agglomeration economies and the hub effect of transport nodes interplay in the making of major cities the model explains the irreversibility of spatial economic development such as the continuing prosperity of port cities even after their initial advantage of water access had become irrelevant it is also shown that in order to decentralize industries from the core region to a periphery region a temporary protection of industries in the periphery by worsening the transport connection with the core for a short period of time may be desirable

managing domestic differences in international negotiations the strategic use of internal side payments when nations negotiate often the toughest bargaining is not between nations but within them the reason is simple proposed international agreements no matter how much in the national interest inevitably have differential effects on factional concerns threatening to make winners of some and losers of others potential losers often have the power to prevent agreements not to their liking thereby limiting what is possible in international negotiations this article uses a negotiation analytic framework to analyze the consequences of such limits it argues that limits need not be a liability for a divided country under some circumstances they may provide a bargaining advantage and demonstrates circumstances under which intracountry differences are desirable and undesirable from a national perspective more specifically the article shows that the effect of domestic differences on international negotiations depends on the configuration of domestic interests on the nature of domestic political processes and on characteristics of the international bargain it then explores a particular dimension of the domestic process the ability to link issues which allow factions to make internal side payments it demonstrates that internal issue linkage can have profound effects on the external bargain and explores the strategic implications of side payments for those who would manage domestic differences in international negotiations

uk regional plant and machinery capital stocks and premature scrapping harris r i d 1997 uk regional plant and machinery capital stocks and premature scrapping reg studies 31 737 750 historically a lack of capital stock data has severely limited the ability to carry out supply side analyses of the british regional economy hence the present paper extends an earlier study to produce uk regional plant and machinery capital stocks for the 1968 91 period in doing so it is necessary to take account of premature scrapping especially during the period after 1977 this was achieved using industry by region data on plant closures which provides a reasonable approximation that is much more reliable than when using figures obtained from interpolating the trend output capital ratio this paper also considers the importance of differing industrial structures on the composition and growth of regional manufacturing capital stock together with why it is important to adjust capital stocks for utilization when estimating supply side relationships based on uk regional data harr

workers marginal costs of commuting abstract this paper applies a dynamic search model to estimate workers marginal costs of commuting including monetary and time costs using data on workers job search activity as well as moving behaviour for the netherlands we provide evidence that on average workers marginal costs of one hour of commuting are about 17 euro

parametric analysis of cost inefficiency and the decomposition of productivity growth for regulated firms this paper examines the contributions of technical change scale economies regulation and efficiency on productivity growth in the interstate natural gas pipeline industry following bauer 1990 productivity growth for firms subject to regulation is decomposed into technical change scale economies regulation and efficiency components the data sample consists of 20 pipeline companies and covers the period 1977 to 1987 results indicate that scale economies cost inefficiency and regulation on average accounted for 64 16 and 4 of productivity growth respectively cost efficiency declined over the sample period most of which can be attributed to technical inefficiency

valuing alternative work arrangements abstract we employ a discrete choice experiment in the employment process for a national call center to estimate the willingness to pay distribution for alternative work arrangements relative to tr

perspectives on the sources of heterogeneity in indian industry abstract this paper examines technical efficiency variation across four industrial sectors in india using a stochastic production frontier technique the results obtained are comparable to technical efficiency distribution patterns obtained in other countries heterogeneity in firm level efficiency is examined against internal firm level and external industry and location characteristics the results suggest that managerial effectiveness significantly influences efficiency and that there are considerable benefits deriving from location within established industrial clusters for particular industries the methodology and findings indicate that the study of industry specific technical efficiency patterns is a useful analytic tool for tracking firm response to ongoing liberalization

the gender wage gap and the role of reservation wages new evidence for unemployed workers this paper examines the importance of differences in reservation wages for the gender wage gap based on two waves of rich survey data for a sample of newly unemployed individuals in germany we perform a decomposition analysis including measures for reservation wages detailed information on education socio demographics labor market history as well as personality traits in order to address the potential endogeneity of reservation wages we exploit a generated instrumental variable strategy that relies on heteroscedasticity of the error terms our findings indicate that the gender wage gap becomes small and statistically insignificant once we control for reservation wages moreover we perform a subgroup analysis that provides valuable insights about the importance of potentially unobserved characteristics that affect reservation wages and realized wages simultaneously reasons for differences in reservation wages could arise from productivity differences the fact that women anticipate discrimination and different unobserved traits or preferences

a cluster analysis study based on profitability and financial indicators in the italian gas retail market in the european union the natural gas market is increasingly being liberalized the liberalization process is aimed at leading to lower prices and higher volumes and hence higher consumer welfare this paper focuses on the changes in performance in the natural gas retail market by analyzing the profit and financial position of the companies concerned over the first three years following the market liberalization the balance sheets of 105 italian companies in this sector are analyzed after which a cluster analysis is performed employing the most significant performance indexes the companies are then analyzed within each cluster with respect to age size geographical location and business diversification the results of our analysis show that the majority of companies attained a high level of performance although this positive outcome was mitigated by the gradual decrease of the average values of performance indicators during the period concerned the companies that achieve the best performances belong to longstanding business groups are medium large sized and are located in the north of the country regarding business diversification in the first two years the specialised companies outperformed the diversified companies

nonparametric measurement of productive efficiency in the presence of regulation abstract during the late 1970s and 1980s volatility in the demand for natural gas in the united states created havoc in the industry s transmission sector managers of firms were presented with the task of improving productive efficiency in an uncertain and regulated industry we measure the relative performance of 20 pipelines using data envelopment analysis dea to produce a regulation constrained minimum cost frontier with the results we construct a fisher productivity index fpi results show that despite productive efficiency decline for most years most firms experienced improvement in technical efficiency and technical progress in most years most of the productive efficiency decline was due to scale diseconomies

cutting across doctrines positive adjustment in japan japan s economy keeps changing too fast its economic policies are too active and independent and its domestic structures seemingly deviate too much from western patterns to conform to theories that rely on general equilibrium in mature economies static economics including recent monetarist supply side and rational expectations models some aspects of dynamic and development economics and most of the neoliberal current in international relations theory are seriously challenged on the other hand the mercantilist paradigm theories focusing on the role of the state and analyses exclusively adopting the subsystemic level of international relations theory have substantial problems with the ample evidence of adaptation to external factors the dynamism and schumpeterian qualities of japanese private enterprises and the far reaching liberalization of japan s foreign exchange and foreign trade control regime as the only oecd member to have pursued anticipatory adjustment on the macrolevel and as the obvious model for the oecd category of positive adjustment japan presents a case of universal relevance it suggests propositions linking targets and instruments of quantitative and qualitative policies as well as processes of internalization of global factors and externalization of domestic factors it provides material for revising extending and integrating international relations theory and the theory of economic policy

returns to scale concept estimation and analysis of japan s turbulent 1964 88 economy there is policy interest in factoring productivity growth into technical progress and returns to scale components our approach uses exact index number methods to reduce the parameters that must be estimated and allows us to exploit the cross sectional dimension of plant level panel data we show that the same equation can also be used to estimate harberger scale economies and technical progress indicators that require fewer assumptions estimates of the elasticity of scale for japanese establishments in three major industries over 1964 88 are presented our study spans the high growth era of the 1960s two oil shocks and other exogenous shocks il y a interet en politique publique a identifier les composantes de la croissance de la productivite attribuables au progres technique et aux rendements a l echelle l approche utilise les methodes des nombres indices exacts pour reduire les parametres qui doivent etres estimes et pouvoir exploiter la dimension transversale des donnees de panel au niveau de l etablissement on montre que la meme equation peut etre utilisee pour estimer les indicateurs d economies d echelle et de progres technique a la harberger lesquels necessitent un plus petit nombre de postulats on presente des evaluations de l elasticite d echelle pour des etablissements japonais dans trois industries importantes entre 1964 et 1988 l etude couvre la periode de forte croissance des annees 1960 celle des deux chocs petroliers et d autres chocs exogenes

profit productivity and price differential an international performance comparison of the natural gas transportation industry the objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance of natural gas transportation utilities focusing on the three key strategic performance measures of profit productivity and price differential we propose a methodology that expresses the three performance measures in a unified single equation using the edgeworth index the proposed methodology is applied to an international comparison of the performance of 28 natural gas transportation utilities operating in eight countries in which the business environments differ greatly the empirical results show the possible causes of performance differences and may shed some light on the direction of regulatory policy especially for developing countries that have relatively short histories in the natural gas industry such as korea

preference for the workplace investment in human capital and gender we use a hypothetical choice methodology to estimate preferences for workplace attributes from a sample of high ability undergraduates attending a highly selective university we estimate that women on average have a higher willingness to pay wtp for jobs with greater work flexibility and job stability and men have a higher wtp for jobs with higher earnings growth these job preferences relate to college major choices and to actual job choices reported in a follow up survey four years after graduation the gender differences in preferences explain at least a quarter of the early career gender wage gap

informal market governance in japan s basic materials industries too much emphasis has been placed on formal state policies and on ties between individual firms to explain japanese economic behavior and impediments to imports in japanese markets we need to look instead at informal governance by trade associations in so doing the concept of relational contracting should be applied not just to dyadic relationships between individual firms but also to relationships between entire industries whole industries engage in relational contracting to ensure the stability of both prices and supplies these industry agreements stabilize japanese markets but at the same time keep imports out of them this informal governance complements state policies to support uncompetitive industries these agreements are more likely to occur and succeed between selling and buying industries that each are relatively concentrated when upstream products are standardized when upstream goods constitute a smaller share of downstream production costs when these sectors have not experienced previous conflicts that undermine cooperation and when the ministry of international trade and industry wants a domestic supply of its products

economies of scale and scope in expansion of the u s natural gas pipeline network abstract i analyze cost capacity mileage and technical data for 254 u s natural gas pipeline projects over the period 1997 2012 although project costs exhibit economies of scale over the capacity margin and economies of scope over the spatial margin network expansion costs may not exhibit cost economies overall that is proportional increases in both transmission capacity and length in miles may result in a proportional or even greater than proportional increase in expansion costs moreover large projects high capacity pipelines spanning long distances likely require installation of compression horsepower which has direct cost effects my results suggest such projects exhibit significant diseconomies in cost structure as a result pipeline tariffs based on cost of service pricing likely present a disincentive for prospective pipeline customers to commit to long term contracts which are necessary for the pipeline to acquire regulatory permission to build particularly for large long distance expansion projects the implication is that cost of service pricing may inhibit network expansion exacerbating congestion issues

urban agglomeration capital augmenting technology and labor market equilibrium abstract the objective of this paper is to measure urban productivity using japanese city based cross sectional data of 1980 the results of a labor demand ols regression analysis suggest two kinds of possible model specifications capital augmenting and demand supply equilibrium each model type is considered and the average effect of population density on labor productivity is shown to be 4 3 in the capital augmenting model and 8 0 in the equilibrium model

productivity growth in british manufacturing spatial variation in the role of scale economies technological growth and industrial structure this paper investigates the role of scale economies technological growth and industrial structure in creating spatial variation in manufacturing labour and total factor tfp productivity in britain separate estimates of a translog specification are presented for british manufacturing firms located in defined areas of the country over the period 1994 1998 the results show that tfp change due to scale economies and technological growth has been of much less important in influencing the output growth of manufacturing firms than input growth or industrial structure regarding the components of tfp technological growth has been the dominant force at play the analysis of average labour productivity identifies shifts to other factors of production and industrial structure as being the main determinants of change scale economies appear to have had a marginal role the results identify spatial patterns indicating that more favourable locational effects arise for firms in areas adjacent to large urban centre

economies of scale and technological progress in electric power production the case of brazilian utilities abstract this paper examined the cost structure of the electricity generation companies in brazil during the period 2000 2010 by using a translog cost function that imposes no restrictions on production technology and allows for the existence of non homotheticity the hypothesis that economies of scale are a typical feature of the generation market in brazil and in general are not exhausted at lower levels of production is not rejected this result supports the vision that indivisibilities restrict efficiency gains from free market competition in the brazilian electricity generation and most of the last restructuring in the industry regulation was based on this assumption furthermore over the sample period technological progress led to cost reductions in electric power supply these technological improvements take the form of both a neutral technological effect as well as a non neutral fuel effect which prevails over the capital and labor saving technical changes

unemployment insurance and reservation wages evidence from administrative data although the reservation wage plays a central role in job search models empirical evidence on the determinants of reservation wages including key policy variables such as unemployment insurance ui is scarce in france unemployed people must declare their reservation wage to the public employment service when they register to claim ui benefits we take advantage of these rich french administrative data and of a reform of ui rules to estimate the effect of the potential benefit duration pbd on reservation wages and on other dimensions of job selectivity using a difference in difference strategy we cannot reject that the elasticity of the reservation wage with respect to pbd is zero our results are precise and we can rule out elasticities larger than 0 006 furthermore we do not find any significant effects of pbd on the desired number of hours duration of labor contract and commuting time distance the estimated elasticity of actual benefit duration with respect to pbd of 0 3 is in line with the consensus in the literature exploiting a regression discontinuity design as an alternative identification strategy we find similar results

a natural monopoly in natural gas transmission abstract in this article we test for subadditivity in the cost structure associated with transporting natural gas by trans canada pipelines ltd and measure for possible cost savings from increased competition that could be realized by removing the monopoly status granted by the national energy board in measuring subadditivity we apply both the baumol et al contestable markets and the theory of industry structure 1982 and the evans and heckman am econ rev 764 1984 613 procedures our results show evidence of subadditivity in the cost structure and consequently the possible benefits from increased competition resulting from splitting up the monopoly could be offset by the sacrifice of scale efficiencies

uncovering the distribution of motorists preferences for travel time and reliability we apply recent econometric advances to study the distribution of commuters preferences for speedy and reliable highway travel our analysis applies mixed logit to combined revealed and stated preference data on commuter choices of whether to pay a toll for congestion free express travel we find that motorists exhibit high values of travel time and reliability and substantial heterogeneity in those values we suggest that road pricing policies designed to cater to such varying preferences can improve efficiency and reduce the disparity of welfare impacts compared with recent pricing experiments

international comparison of bank production characteristics and technological change in this paper we conduct an international comparison of bank production and technological characteristics the comparison is performed using novel evidence on changes in labour demand over the period 1980 89 for banks headquartered in canada france west germany italy japan and the united states the results suggest that there is relatively low substitutability of labour for capital in the production process of these banking organizations significant scale economies were found with regards to the expansion of output and the concomitant increase in labour in addition technological change operated to lower the quantity of inputs needed to produce a given level of outputs and increased the minimum efficient size bank over the sample period many of the production characteristics and technology effects varied significantly across countries these findings imply that intercountry differences in production characteristics and technological change should be explicitly recognized in bank strategic planning

wages and commuting quasi natural experiments evidence from firms that relocate we examine individual level compensating differentials for commuting distance in a quasi natural experiment setting by examining how wages respond to changes in commuting distance induced by firm relocations this set up enables us to test for the relevance of job search frictions within labour market models due to the quasi experimental set up we are able to avoid a range of endogeneity issues we demonstrate that a 1 km increase in commuting distance induces an almost negligible wage increase in the year after the relocation but a more substantial wage increase of about 0 15 three years later 2013 royal economic society

agglomeration economies in urban manufacturing industries a case of japanese cities abstract the effects of urban agglomeration economies on productivities in two digit manufacturing industries is estimated using the cross section data of japanese cities in 1979 urbanization and localization economies which are major forms of urban agglomeration economies are explicitly separated the estimates of these economies vary considerably among industries light industries receive more productive advantages from urbanization economies than from localization economies but heavy industries experience these economies more from localization economies than from urbanization economies

a general index of technical change this paper outlines a procedure for estimating a general index of technical change within the context of a quite general production technology specifically when panel data are available for firms in an industry time specific dummies can be combined in a nonlinear estimation procedure to yield a general index of technical change that may be both nonneutral and scale augmenting this approach offers numerous advantages over the traditional time trend representation of technical change for example the general index can serve as the basis for analysis of the determinants of technical change results for a sample of 30 electric utilities over the period 1951 78 show that the productivity decline of the 1970s can be attributed primarily to sulphur oxide restrictions and secularly declining capacity utilization due to rapidly increasing peak load demands

the spanish automotive industry scale economies and input relationships this paper investigates the existence of economies of scale in the spanish automobile industry as well as the substitution possibilities between input pairs and the direct and cross price elasticities of demand for the various inputs by estimating a translog cost function for both a three input model involving capital labour and intermediate goods as well as a four input model where energy is separated from other intermediate goods the results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis of economies of scale in the spanish automobile industry particularly at the low and mean levels of output these results also are consistent with the hypothesis that capital is a substitute for the other inputs but that labour and intermediate goods are complements labour and energy also appear to have a complementary relationship over most of the data points in this study the significance of a complementary relationship between labour and intermediate goods is that any attempt by the spanish government to res

productivity growth technical change and economies of scale of korean fossil fuel generation companies 2001 2012 a dual approach abstract this paper examines total factor productivity tfp growth technical change and economies of scale measure of korean fossil fuel power generation companies gencos between 2001 and 2012 for the empirical investigation we estimated the cost function along with specification tests in order to find the most appropriate empirical model empirical results show tfp deterioration technical regress and economies of scale for the study period the optimal size of the korean gencos was also found which is employed in developing policies regarding tfp growth and technical advance

the translog production function and variable returns to scale this paper examines existing methods of estimating the translog production function and provides a general framework that allows for variable returns to scale the model is based on the inverse input demand function and embeds a nonhomothetic production technology previous estimation methods are valid only for homogeneous technologies with fixed scale effects estimation results for u s manufacturing show that neither homotheticity and homogeneity nor constant returns to scale is a proper characterization of the underlying structure of production thereby vindicating the empirical relevance of the inverse demand framework that entails a nonhomothetic technology copyright 1992 by mit press

rational inefficiency adjustment costs and sequential technologies abstract in this paper we propose a novel approach to estimate the rational inefficiency of decision making units in the presence of adjustment costs using sequential definitions of the production technology we show how cost inefficiency can be decomposed into rational and residual inefficiency as well as inefficiency caused by technical change furthermore we estimate lower bounds for the unobserved adjustment costs based on unexploited cost reductions due to rational inefficiency these adjustment costs are used to evaluate the feasibility of exploiting cost reductions caused by residual inefficiency we demonstrate the empirical applicability of our model by estimating and decomposing the cost inefficiency of u s coal fired power plants using panel data which cover the period between 1994 and 2009

agglomeration economies and productivity in indian industry abstract the primary objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which agglomeration economies contribute to economic productivity we distinguish three sources of agglomeration economies 1 at the firm level from improved access to market centers 2 at the industry level from intra industry localization economies and 3 at the regional level from inter industry urbanization economies there is considerable variation in the sources and magnitudes of agglomeration economies between industrial sectors in particular our results indicate that access to markets through improvements in inter regional infrastructure is an important determinant of firm level productivity whereas benefits of locating in dense urban areas do not appear to offset associated costs

production and costs in the south african motor vehicle industry this study investigates the existence of economies of scale in the south african motor vehicle industry as well as the substitution possibilities between input pairs and the direct and cross price elasticities of demand for the various inputs because of data limitations a translog cost function was estimated for only a three input model corresponding to a homogeneous production function involving capital labour and intermediate goods the issue of the existence of economies of scale in the south african motor vehicle industry is a particularly important one because south africa once again is a member of gatt and a full participant in the international trade arena the null hypothesis of constant returns to scale was rejected at the 0 5 level of significance thus the results of this model are certainly consistent with economies of scale in the south african motor vehicle industry the estimated direct price elasticities were consistent with the hypothesis that during the past two decades capital wa

firm location and city size reduced productivity advantages as a factor in the decline of manufacturing in urban areas abstract this paper develops a model of firm location and city size that arrives at theoretical conclusions that differ from those of other authors comparative statics results suggest that changes in national wage levels and productivity levels create no determinate dis advantage for large cities relative to small ones as sites for manufacturing activity increased wage and reduced productivity premiums of large cities however result in unambiguous disadvantages statistical analysis indicates that the productivity advantages of large cities have declined in as many as eight two digit manufacturing industries that provide more than one third of metropolitan production worker employment

the gender reservation wage gap evidence from british panel data abstract our findings suggest the existence of a gender reservation wage gap the presence of children particularly pre school age children plays an important role in determining the proportion of this gap that can be explained by individual characteristics

the pervasive absence of compensating differentials we study the relation between individual preferences for job amenities e g type of work job security and compensating wage differentials in cross section to this end we estimate a partial equilibrium job search model on panel data from eight european countries there are five non wage job characteristics and two sources of job to job mobility on the job search and reallocation shocks we also allow for two types of unobserved heterogeneity we find strong preferences for amenities especially job security yet these preferences do not translate into significant wage differentials in cross section counterfactual experiments show that one would need extremely low levels of search frictions for compensating differentials to arise lastly a similar exercise on the distribution of job change outcomes reveals the role of constrained job to job mobility in the absence of compensating wage differentials copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd