stochastic dea with ordinal data applied to a multi attribute pricing problem multiple attribute pricing problems are highly challenging due to the dynamic and uncertain features in the associated market in this paper we address the condominium multiple attribute pricing problem using data envelopment analysis dea in this study we simultaneously consider stochastic variables non discretionary variables and ordinal data and present a new type of dea model based on our proposed dea an effective performance measurement tool is developed to provide a basis for understanding the condominium pricing problem to direct and monitor the implementation of pricing strategy and to provide information regarding the results of pricing efforts for units sold as well as insights for future building design a case study is executed on a leading canadian condominium developer

multi factor performance measure model with an application to fortune 500 companies abstract the paper develops tools for reconciling diverse measures which characterize the financial performance of the fortune 500 companies the technology of data envelopment analysis dea is employed to determine a multi factor financial performance model which inherently recognizes tradeoffs among various financial measures this study offers an alternative perspective and characterization on the performance of the fortune 500 companies it is shown that the top ranked companies by revenue do not necessarily have top ranked performance viewed as being multidimensional only about 3 companies were operating on the best practice frontier substantial technical and scale inefficiencies are found decreasing returns to scale drs are uncovered among the relatively large revenue top ranked companies the study of congestion shows that a reduction in current levels of employees assets and equity may actually increase revenue and profit levels factor specific measures within the framework of multidimensional measure are developed to further study the performance of companies and industries the performance of best practice frontier companies is analyzed by constructing reference share measures which indicate the role each frontier company plays in evaluating non frontier companies finally the reliability of the best practice frontier is examined

efficiency analysis for exogenously fixed inputs and outputs we evaluate by means of mathematical programming formulations the relative technical and scale efficiencies of decision making units dmus when some of the inputs or outputs are exogenously fixed and beyond the discretionary control of dmu managers this approach further develops the work on efficiency evaluation and on estimation of efficient production frontiers known as data envelopment analysis dea we also employ the model to provide efficient input and output targets for dmu managers in a way that specifically accounts for the fixed nature of some of the inputs or outputs we illustrate the approach using real data for a network of fast food restaurants

is the united states really underinvesting in agricultural research comment the tax system may bias upward estimates of the rate of return to public agricultural research fox gives an example to illustrate the effect of failure to acknowledge the deadweight loss dwl of taxation by assuming a uniform stream of benefits the purpose of this note is a to show that fox s example overestimates the effect of dwl on the rate of return and b to use a more realistic stream of benefits to assess the effect of dwl

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

the effect of income taxation on labor supply in the united states the effect of income taxation on the labor supply of prime age married men and women in the united states is examined using econometric methods similar to those used in the influential work of jerry hausman male labor supply is found to be relatively invariant to the net wage and virtual income in all specifications estimated the estimated impact of taxation on the labor supply of married women depends critically on the method used to estimate the labor supply function estimated net wage and virtual income elasticities are considerably larger when data on nonparticipants are included than when the estimation is conducted conditional on hours being greater than zero

agriculture s environmental externalities dea evidence for french agriculture the existence of persistent technical inefficiency offers the opportunity for a free lunch not typically implied by the neoclassical theory of the firm when external effects are related to the use of particular inputs reduction of persistent technically inefficient levels of input use represents a means of reducing external impacts an important example is found in agriculture where substantial environmental impacts are generated by particular inputs within this context this paper considers the usefulness of data envelopment analysis dea for estimation of potential input reductions and assessment of potential reductions of environmental impacts of agricultural inputs an application for french cereal production provides estimates that indicate that substantial potential exists for reduction of input use and environmental impacts

new evidence on labor supply employment versus hours elasticities by sex and marital status using the tri annual micro panel data of the survey of income and program participation we estimate fixed effects labor supply models separating the extensive and intensive margins the employment elasticity is 0 6 for single men versus 1 1 for married men the employment elasticity is 2 4 for single women versus 1 8 for married women the compensated hours worked elasticity is 0 4 for employed single and married men and 0 7 for employed single and married women the implied aggregate employment elasticity of 1 5 and hours per employee elasticity of 0 5 indicate employment fluctuations account for three fourths of wage induced variation in labor hours

is the united states really underinvesting in agricultural research that the level of public investment in u s agricultural research is too low is widely accepted this paper argues that there are two important limitations to the evidence assembled in support of the underinvestment hypothesis a many authors have compared the social rate of return to public investments with the private rate of return to private investments b costs of public expenditures on agricultural research have been underestimated by a failure to account for the marginal excess burden of the tax collection system taking these two factors into account evidence in support of the underinvestment hypothesis is weakened considerably

evaluation of four tax reforms in the united states labor supply and welfare effects for single mothers an emerging consensus is that labor force participation is more responsive to taxes and transfers than hours worked to understand the implications of participation responses for the welfare analysis of tax reform this paper embeds this margin of labor supply in an explicit welfare theoretic framework we apply the framework to examine the welfare effects on single mothers in the united states following four tax acts passed in 1986 1990 1993 and 2001 we propose a simulation method combining features of fully structural microsimulation studies and simple deadweight loss calculations our approach accounts for the observed heterogeneity in the microdata but is simple to implement because we do not need to specify utility functions and estimate utility parameters we find that each of the four tax acts created substantial welfare gains and that the gains were concentrated almost exclusively on the participation margin our results imply that standard approaches not modeling the participation decision can make large errors

the surprising power of age dependent taxes this paper provides a new empirically driven application of the dynamic mirrleesian framework by studying a feasible and potentially powerful tax reform age dependent labour income taxation i show analytically how age dependence improves policy on both the intratemporal and intertemporal margins i use detailed numerical simulations calibrated with data from the u s panel study of income dynamics to generate robust policy implications age dependence 1 lowers marginal taxes on average and especially on high income young workers and 2 lowers average taxes on all young workers relative to older workers when private saving and borrowing are restricted finally i calculate and characterize the welfare gains from age dependence despite its simplicity age dependence generates a welfare gain equal to between 0 6 and 1 5 of aggregate annual consumption and it captures more than 60 of the gain from reform to the dynamic optimal policy the gains are due to substantial increases in both efficiency and equity when age dependence is restricted to be pareto improving the welfare gain is nearly as large

new evidence on earnings and benefit claims following changes in the retirement earnings test in 2000 abstract this paper examines the labor force activity and timing of benefit claims of workers aged 65 69 in response to the removal of the retirement earnings test in 2000 we use the 1 sample of longitudinal social security administrative data that covers the period from 4 years before to 4 years after the removal of the test using a reduced form quantile regression method we find that effects on earnings are limited to workers with earnings just around the test threshold and above as predicted by economic theory our estimated effects suggest that labor supply elasticities with respect to the net of tax rate are approximately 0 05 0 07 for working primary beneficiaries aged 65 69 whose earnings are between the median and the 80th percentile further results show that applications for social security benefits following the earnings test removal accelerated by 2 to 5 percentage points among individuals aged 65 69 and by 3 to 7 percentage points among those reaching age 65

are hospitals seasonally inefficient evidence from washington state efficiency measurement has been one of the most extensively explored areas of health services research over the past two decades despite this attention few studies have examined whether a provider s efficiency varies on a monthly quarterly or other sub annual basis this article presents an empirical study that looks for evidence of seasonal inefficiency using a quarterly panel of general acute care hospitals from washington state we find that hospital efficiency does vary over time however the nature of this dynamic inefficiency depends on the type of efficiency being measured our results suggest that technical and cost efficiency vary by quarter allocative and scale efficiency also vary on a quarterly basis but only if the data are jointly disaggregated by quarter and another firm specific factor such as size or operating status thus future research corporate decisions and government policies designed to improve the efficiency of hospital care need to account for seasonal trends in hospi

effects of social security policies on benefit claiming retirement and saving abstract an enhanced version of a structural model jointly explains benefit claiming wealth and retirement including reversals from states of lesser to greater work the model is estimated with health and retirement study data alternative beliefs about the future of social security affect claiming behavior effects of three potential policies are also examined increasing the early entitlement age increasing the full retirement age and eliminating the payroll tax for seniors predicted responses to increasing the full entitlement age are sensitive to beliefs

health insurance and retirement of married couples summary most health insurance in the usa is provided by employers until eligibility for public health insurance medicare begins at age 65 retiring before 65 exposes workers who lack retiree health insurance coverage to the risk of catastrophic medical expenditure we solve and estimate a dynamic model of the employment behavior of older married couples that includes risky medical expenditure and health insurance parameter estimates imply that the risk reducing feature of health insurance can account for about half of the observed association between retiree health insurance and employment for married men but can account for only one tenth of the much larger observed association for married women policy simulations imply very small effects on employment of changing the age of eligibility for medicare from 65 to 67 copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

the effect of taxes on male and female labor supply in sweden this paper estimates labor supply functions for married men and women in sweden using data from 1980 taking account of the complete form of individuals budget constraints both linear and quadratic supply functions are estimated with and without random preferences a novel feature is that for women the wage rate and labor supply functions are estimated simultaneously using a full information maximum likelihood method this method yields substantially larger wage and income elasticities than does the previously used two step methods another result is that the quadratic supply function wage elasticities for men and women are virtually the same if the elasticities are evaluated at the same net wage rate and hours of work for men and women the estimated functions are used to calculate the effect of tax reforms

estimating labour supply responses using tax reforms the 1980 s tax reforms and the changing dispersion of wages offer one of the best opportunities yet to estimate labor supply effects nevertheless changing sample composition aggregate shocks the changing composition of the tax paying population and discontinuities in the tax system create serious identification and estimation problems we develop grouping estimators that address these issues our results reveal positive and moderately sized wage elasticities we also find negative income effects for women with children

new evidence on pensions social security and the timing of retirement using a unique dataset that links the economic and demographic information of households with the details of their pension formulas i estimate the combined effect of social security and pension benefits on the probability of retirement in a cross section of the population near retirement age the accrual rate of retirement wealth is shown to be a significant determinant of the probability of retirement simulations of extensions in pension coverage comparable to those that occurred in the early postwar period can account for one fourth of the contemporaneous decline in labor force participation rates 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

benchmarking urban energy efficiency in the uk this study asks what is the best way to measure urban energy efficiency there has been recent interest in identifying efficient cities so that best practices can be shared a process known as benchmarking previous studies have used relatively simple metrics that provide limited insight on the complexity of urban energy efficiency and arguably fail to provide a fair measure of urban performance using a data set of 198 urban uk local administrative units three methods are compared ratio measures regression residuals and data envelopment analysis the results show that each method has its own strengths and weaknesses regarding the ease of interpretation ability to identify outliers and provide consistent rankings efficient areas are diverse but are notably found in low income areas of large conurbations such as london whereas industrial areas are consistently ranked as inefficient the results highlight the shortcomings of the underlying production based energy accounts ideally urban energy efficiency benchmarks would be built on consumption based accounts but interim recommendations are made regarding the use of efficiency measures that improve upon current practice and facilitate wider conversations about what it means for a specific city to be energy efficient within an interconnected economy

how longer work lives ease the crunch of population aging population aging is not a looming crisis of the future it is already here populations age when life expectancy rises and fertility declines economic challenges arise when the increase in people surviving to old age and the decline in the number of young people alive to support them cause the growth in society s consumption needs to outpace growth in its productive capacity the ultimate impact of population aging on our standard of living in the future depends a great deal on how long people choose to work before they retire from the labor force here there is reason for optimism the end of the twentieth century witnessed a profound change in retirement behavior for over a century the labor force participation rate of men over age 65 declined falling steadily from 75 percent in the late 1800s to just 16 percent in 1990 moen 1994 costa 1998 at the end of the twentieth century however the labor force participation rate of older men began to rise quinn 2002 the labor force participation rate of older women rose as well following a remarkable increase in labor force participation among younger women over many decades a constellation of forces some just now gaining momentum has raised labor force participation at older ages at just the time it is needed age related health declines and the reluctance of employers to hire and retain older workers present challenges but the outlook for future gains in labor force participation at older ages is promising the labor market is accommodating older workers to some degree and older men and women are themselves adapting on a number of fronts which could substantially lessen the economic impact of population aging the paper begins by documenting the striking shift in the population age distribution well under way the slowdown in labor force growth and the corresponding rise in the economic dependency ratio which can be viewed as a measure of society s consumption needs relative to its productive capacity we document the historic turnaround in labor force participation and show how future increases in participation could significantly dampen the rise in the economic dependency ratio in the second section we turn to the most important factors behind the increase in labor force participation realized to date the shift in the skill composition of the workforce and technological change in the third section we argue that forces such as changes in the structure of employer provided pensions and social security are likely to propel future increases in labor force participation at older ages the fourth section illustrates the diversity of adaptations already at play in the labor market as older men and women seek to extend their working lives finally we discuss the relatively less dramatic population aging in the united states compared to other high income countries and how the united states is better poised than many countries to attain further gains in labor force participation at older ages

changes in the labor supply behavior of married women 1980 2000 using march current population survey data we investigate married women s labor supply from 1980 to 2000 we find a large rightward shift in their labor supply function for annual hours in the 1980s with little shift in the 1990s these shifts account for most of the slowdown in the growth of labor supply during this period a major development was the dramatic decrease in the responsiveness of married women s labor supply to their own and husbands wages their own wage elasticity fell by 50 56 while their cross wage elasticity fell by 38 47 in absolute value

a structural model of multiple welfare program participation and labor supply work on estimating the labor supply effects of high marginal tax rates in welfare programs has been hindered by the difficulty of estimating the effects of participation in multiple welfare programs simultaneously the authors solve this problem by applying methods of simulation estimation to a model of labor supply and multiple program participation the results show asymmetric wage and tax rate effects with fairly large wage elasticities of labor supply but very inelastic responses to moderate changes in cumulative marginal tax rates implying that high welfare tax rates do not necessarily induce major reductions in work effort copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

estimating technical and allocative efficiency in the public sector a nonparametric analysis of dutch schools abstract public sector output provision is influenced not only by discretionary inputs but also by exogenous environmental factors in this paper we extended the literature by developing a conditional dea estimator of allocative efficiency that allows a decomposition of overall cost efficiency into allocative and technical components while simultaneously controlling for the environment we apply the model to analyze technical and allocative efficiency of dutch secondary schools the results reveal that allocative efficiency represents a significant 37 percent of overall cost efficiency on average although technical inefficiency is still the dominant part furthermore the results show that the impact of environment largely differs between schools and that having a more unfavorable environment is very expensive to schools these results highlight the importance of including environmental variables in both technical and allocative efficiency analysis

toward obtaining a consistent estimate of the elasticity of taxable income using difference in differences abstract the elasticity of taxable income eti is a central parameter for tax policy debates this paper shows that mean reversion prevents most estimators employed in the literature from obtaining consistent estimates of the eti a new method is proposed that will resolve inconsistency due to mean reversion under testable assumptions regarding the degree of serial correlation in the error term using this procedure i estimate an eti of 0 858 which is about twice as large as the estimates found in the most frequently cited paper on this subject 13 the corresponding elasticity of broad income is 0 475

identifying the elasticity of taxable income we use matched panels from the current population survey along with a grouping instrumental variables estimator to provide new estimates of the elasticity of taxable income our identification strategy exploits the fact that federal and state tax reforms over the past three decades have differentially affected cohorts across states and over time we find that the elasticity is in the range of 0 4 0 55 the implication of our new estimates for tax policy is that the revenue maximising tax rate is nearly 30 percentage points lower than that obtained when we use the typical identification strategy in the literature

efficiency measures and productivity indexes in the context of university library benchmarking data envelopment analysis dea has attracted considerable attention during the last few decades as an intuitively clear method for performance assessment theoretical developments have taken turns with empirical efficiency studies in this paper we empirically analyse performance differences across university libraries from different countries from a cross section and a longitudinal perspective we use the malmquist index approach to disentangle environmental efficiency from technical efficiency te to highlight performance differences eventually induced by environmental factors beyond the control of library management as well as to decompose productivity changes over time into changes in te and changes in technology in our cross section analysis we found that north american na libraries are more productive at higher input levels than the european libraries from germany and austria at which we looked in this contribution moreover the largest na libraries are still able to improve performance as t

evaluating the operational efficiency of major ports in the asia pacific region using data envelopment analysis in recent years as competition among international ports has intensified the impartial and objective evaluation of port operational efficiency has become increasingly important in enabling each individual port to understand its peculiar strengths and weaknesses as well as any immediate threats or opportunities that may affect its competitive environment this study applies ccr model bcc model and 3 stage dea model to evaluate the changes in efficiency that have taken place between 1998 and 2001 in 10 ports in the asia pacific region using cross period data the empirical results show that different model will lead to different result on average the efficiency estimated by 3 stage dea procedure is the highest while ccr efficiency is the lowest it should be noted that the efficiencies based on ccr and bcc model are somewhat lower than the 3 stage dea approaches because they do not take the environmental factors managerial inefficiency and statistical noises into account

anticipating the consequences of school reform a new use of dea we use dea type linear programming techniques to simulate a basic component of educational reform eliminating restrictions on the allocation of school personnel our technique allows us to identify potential output gains or equivalently potential cost savings from reform we can also identify which personnel groups are likely to gain and lose under this reform when we apply our model to a sample of texas school districts we find evidence that the educational establishment has substantial economic rents to protect from school reform and that the primary beneficiaries of reform are likely to be affluent school districts with few minority students the technique which relies on the relationship between the direct and indirect distance functions can be easily generalized to measure the potential gains from removing other input restrictions such as union work rules environmental regulations or deed restrictions

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

did soviet elderly employment respond to financial incentives evidence from pension reforms abstract this study answers the open question of whether workers respond to financial incentives in a command economy to do this i evaluate pension reforms in soviet russia in 1964 and 1969 that allowed pensioners to receive a greater share of their pensions if they worked resulting in a progressive elimination of benefit reduction rates variation in group eligibility and variation in benefit reduction rates in eastern and western regions allow for the use of several difference in differences frameworks i collect and digitize novel data from the soviet archives on pensioner employment constructing the first database of the soviet old age labor market i find that soviet pensioners are responsive to financial incentives by 1969 after the benefit reduction rate fell from an average of 47 8 to 24 1 pensioner employment rates rose by 5 7 percentage points representing a 47 increase finally i provide illustrative estimates of the employment elasticity with respect to the average net of tax rate that range from 0 6 to 1 4

nonparametric analysis of educational costs abstract traditional economic analyses of the public sector that assume cost minimization are not consistent with political models of bureaucracy if costs are not minimized then estimated cost functions will be biased the purpose of this paper is to provide a flexible nonparametric technique based on farrell type efficiency measures to estimate public sector costs standard indices need to be modified to fit the special nature of public sector service provision which is characterized by an influence of exogenous variables on cost a useful by product is an index of environmental harshness faced by local governments for illustrative purposes this technique is applied to a sample of new york state school districts it is found that nearly 64 of districts are cost inefficient spending on average 1200 per pupil above the cost minimizing level in addition it is estimated that the average school district faces environmental cost of over 1700 per pupil

the economic and poverty impacts of maize research in west and central africa this article assembles the results of three multicountry surveys on variety performance and adoption patterns to measure the impacts of maize research in west and central africa from 1981 to 2005 and uses cost data since 1971 to compute social rates of return on public investments in maize research in the region adoption of modern varieties increased from less than 5 of the maize area in the 1970s to about 60 in 2005 yielding an aggregate rate of return on research and development r d investment of 43 the estimated number of people moved out of poverty through adoption of new maize varieties rose gradually in the 1980s to more than one million people per year since the mid 1990s over half of these impacts can be attributed to international maize research at iita and cimmyt the article concludes with a discussion of strategic options to enhance the impacts of maize research in the region

labor supply and taxes a survey i survey the male and female labor supply literatures focusing on implications for effects of wages and taxes for males i describe and contrast results from three basic types of model static models especially those that account for nonlinear taxes life cycle models with savings and life cycle models with both savings and human capital for women more important distinctions are whether models include fixed costs of work and whether they treat demographics like fertility and marriage and human capital as exogenous or endogenous the literature is characterized by considerable controversy over the responsiveness of labor supply to changes in wages and taxes at least for males it is fair to say that most economists believe labor supply elasticities are small but a sizeable minority of studies that i examine obtain large values hence there is no clear consensus on this point in fact a simple average of hicks elasticities across all the studies i examine is 0 30 several simulation studies have shown that such a value is large enough to generate large welfare costs of income taxation for males i conclude that two factors drive many of the differences in results across studies one factor is use of direct vs ratio wage measures with studies that use the former tending to find larger elasticties another factor is the failure of most studies to account for human capital returns to work experience i argue that this may lead to downward bias in elasticity estimates in a model that includes human capital i show how even modest elasticities as conventionally measured can be consistent with large welfare costs of taxation

the elasticity of taxable income with respect to marginal tax rates a critical review this paper critically surveys the large and growing literature estimating the elasticity of taxable income with respect to marginal tax rates using tax return data first we provide a theoretical framework showing under what assumptions this elasticity can be used as a sufficient statistic for efficiency and optimal tax analysis we discuss what other parameters should be estimated when the elasticity is not a sufficient statistic second we discuss conceptually the key issues that arise in the empirical estimation of the elasticity of taxable income using the example of the 1993 top individual income tax rate increase in the united states to illustrate those issues third we provide a critical discussion of selected empirical analyses of the elasticity of taxable income in light of the theoretical and empirical framework we laid out finally we discuss avenues for future research jel h24 h31 j22

energy efficiency measurement in agriculture with imprecise energy content information abstract measuring energy efficiency is crucial when planning energy reduction policies however decision makers are understandably reluctant to act in the absence of solid data and results supporting a policy position this paper proposes a methodology to measure the energy efficiency of farms based on the data envelopment analysis dea approach in a manner similar to the cost framework we decompose energy efficiency measurements into technical and allocative efficiencies in energy contents of inputs in this study we replace input prices used in traditional economic efficiency measurements by their energy content we use the energy efficiency model to explore the optimal input mix that produces the current outputs at minimum energy consumption we demonstrate that this decomposition can help policy makers design accurate energy policies however the uncertainty of the data and more particularly the energy content of the inputs leads us to recommend using the methodologies to calculate the bounds of efficiency to obtain more plausible and robust results based on our analysis energy efficiency is not a fixed value and policy makers should consider it with caution we use a 2007 database of french farms specialised in field crops for empirical illustration

a conditional directional distance function approach for measuring regional environmental efficiency evidence from uk regions abstract this paper by using conditional directional distance functions as introduced by simar and vanhems j econometrics 166 2012 342 354 modifies the model by fare and grosskopf eur j operat res 157 2004 242 245 and examines the link between regional environmental efficiency and economic growth the proposed model using conditional directional distance functions incorporates the effect of regional economic growth on regions environmental efficiency levels the results from uk regional data reveal a negative relationship between regions gdp per capita and environmental inefficiency up to a certain gdp per capita level after that level it appears that the relationship becomes positive as an overall result the regional environmental inefficiency gdp per capita relationship appears to have a u shape form

returns to public sector plant breeding in the presence of spill ins and private goods the case of bean research in michigan this article illustrates a methodology for assessing economic returns to a publicly funded breeding program in the presence of private sector investments and spill ins from other contemporary public institutions and past research efforts the approach consists of determining yield gains from bean improvement research applying these yield gain estimates to measure benefits attributable to different institutional players and time periods and then assessing the benefit cost ratios of investments in a bean improvement program since 1980 by michigan state university msu the results indicate that investments in msu s bean breeding program have yielded benefits to costs ratio in the range of 0 7 to 2 2 depending on the attribution rule used to estimate the benefits the estimated benefit cost ratios reported in this study are lower bound estimates as they do not account for potential benefits from area planted to msu varieties outside of michigan spillover effects which was 1 5 times greater than the area planted to msu bred varieties within michigan in the period 1998 2002 the implications of the increasingly privatized bean seed markets for the role of public sector research in bean improvement research are discussed

taxes and the labor market participation of married couples the earned income tax credit a distinguishing feature of recent changes to the us system of public assistance is its increasing focus on working families and reliance on the tax system to transfer dollars to needy families after a decade in near total obscurity the earned income tax credit eitc was expanded to become the largest cash transfer program for lower income families with children advocates of the eitc argue that unlike traditional welfare the credit helps promote both the values of family and work indeed empirical evidence consistent with economic theory suggests that the eitc promotes employment among eligible unmarried women with children to target benefits to lower income families however the eitc is based on family income leading to traditional welfare type disincentives for most eligible secondary earners in fact the eitc is likely to reduce overall family labor supply among married couples this paper examines the labor force participation response of married couples to eitc expansions between 1984 and 1996 the effect of the credit is estimated using both quasiexperimental and traditional reduced form labor supply models results from both models show the same qualitative conclusion that the eitc expansions reduced total family labor supply of married couples in all cases we find a decline in labor force participation by married women that more than offsets any rise in participation by their spouses while the labor force participation rate of married men increased by about 0 2 percentage points that of married women decreased by just over a full percentage point these aggregate effects mask substantial heterogeneity in the population women facing the strongest disincentives were more than 2 percentage points less likely to work after the expansions these findings imply that the eitc is effectively subsidizing married mothers to stay home and therefore have implications for the design of the program d 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the effect of marginal tax rates on taxable income a panel study of the 1986 tax reform act this paper uses a treasury department panel of more than 4 000 taxpayers to estimate the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates on the basis of a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform the analysis emphasizes that the response of taxable income involves much more than a change in the traditional measures of labor supply the evidence shows an elasticity of taxable income with respect to the marginal net of tax rate that is at least one and could be substantially higher the implications for recent tax rate changes are discussed

spatial statistical methods applied to the 2015 brazilian energy distribution benchmarking model accounting for unobserved determinants of inefficiencies abstract in 2015 the brazilian regulator presented a dea benchmarking model to set the regulatory operational cost goals to be reached in four years for 61 electricity distribution utilities the dea model uses adjusted operational cost as the input variable seven output variables and weight restrictions although non discretionary variables or environmental variables are available in the dataset the regulator argued that no statistically significant correlation was found between the dea efficiency scores and the non discretionary variables this study evaluates the statistical correlation between the dea efficiency scores and the available environmental variables spatial statistic methods are used to show that the efficiency scores are geographically correlated furthermore due to brazil s environmental diversity and large territory it is unlikely that only one environmental component is sufficient to adjust inefficiencies across the brazilian territory thus a new combined environmental variable is proposed finally a second stage model using the proposed environmental variable and accounting for a spatial latent structure is presented results show major differences between original and corrected efficiency scores mainly for utilities located in harsh environments and which originally achieved lower efficiency scores

data envelopment analysis with resource constraints an alternative model with non discretionary factors abstract it is shown that supplying additional resources in order to achieve full efficiency is equivalent to expansion of the input output space with additional factors that are non discretionary resource intensive and resource extensive efficiencies are introduced and defined a numerical example is given

the effects of health insurance and self insurance on retirement behavior this paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of employer provided health insurance medicare and social security on retirement behavior using data from the health and retirement study we estimate a dynamic programming model of retirement that accounts for both saving and uncertain medical expenses our results suggest that medicare is important for understanding retirement behavior and that uncertainty and saving are both important for understanding the labor supply responses to medicare half the value placed by a typical worker on his employer provided health insurance is the value of reduced medical expense risk raising the medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 leads individuals to work an additional 0 074 years over ages 60 69 in comparison eliminating 2 years worth of social security benefits increases years of work by 0 076 years

the effect of income taxes on household income research on the distribution of income during the 1980s has identified a trend towards increasing inequality which may be the continuation and acceleration of trends spanning several decades this paper explores to what extent behavioral responses to the tax changes during the 1980s may also explain the rising inequality the 1986 tax reform act is used as a natural experiment to explore the roles played by both taxes and a variety of nontax factors our principal finding is that both tax rates and nontax factors appear to have had significant effects on relative income growth during the late 1980s

the econometrics of nonlinear budget sets traditional empirical analysis of consumer demand has usually made the assumption of linear budget sets that is the consumer is assumed to purchase any desired quantity at a constant price subject to a budget constraint the major exception to this framework is the analysis of demand when some goods are rationed 2 in the rationed case the price is constant up to a quantity limit in contrast to the rationed case here i consider the situation where the price varies with the amount of the good purchased empirical situations with nonconstant prices come readily to mind and of course they have received much recent attention from theorists since mirrlees 44 paper on optimal nonlinear taxation the following examples are meant to give a partial listing of cases when nonlinear budget sets occur i electricity prices many electric utilities engage in declining block pricing that is the marginal price of successive kwh s of electricity decrease at a given number of points determined by total demand thus the budget set is piecewise linear houthakker 36 was the first to propose an approach to this problem taylor 51 analyzes the problem at length and hausman kinnucin and mcfadden 31 use an instrumental variables estimator to provide consistent estimates of the demand function

taxes and time allocation evidence from single women and men the classic model of becker 1965 suggests that labor supply decisions should be analyzed within the broader context of time allocation and market good consumption choices but most empirical work on policy has focused exclusively on measuring impacts on market work this paper examines how income taxes affect time allocation during the entire day and how these time allocation decisions interact with expenditure patterns using the panel study of income dynamics from 1975 to 2004 we analyze the response of single women s housework labor supply and other time to variation in tax and transfer schedules across income levels number of children states and time we find that when the economic reward to participating in the labor force increases market work increases and housework decreases with the decrease in housework accounting for approximately two thirds of the increase in market work analysis of repeated cross sections of time diary data from 1975 to 2004 shows that home production decreases substantially when market hours of work increase in response to policy changes data on expenditures from the consumer expenditure survey from 1980 to 2003 show some evidence that expenditures on market goods likely to substitute for housework increase in response to a greater incentive to join the labor force the baseline estimates imply that the elasticity of substitution between consumption of home and market goods is 2 61 the results are consistent with the becker model meanwhile single men show little response to changes in tax policy and we are able to rule out an elasticity of substitution between home and market goods for this group of more than 1 52

piecewise loglinear estimation of efficient production surfaces linear programming formulations for piecewise loglinear estimation of efficient production surfaces are derived from a set of basic properties postulated for the underlying production possibility sets unlike the piecewise linear model of banker charnes and cooper banker r d a charnes w w cooper 1984 models for the estimation of technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis management sci 30 september 1078 1092 this approach permits the identification of increasing marginal products and estimation of the classical s shaped production functions methods are also provided for estimating technical inefficiencies and other production characteristics such as rates of substitution and transformation marginal products returns to scale and most productive scale sizes on the basis of observed production data the results of a simulation study are reported to illustrate the usefulness of this estimation method in empirical applications when there are a priori reasons to expect increasing marginal products in some regions of the production function a modified model is provided to extend this analysis to the situation of non competing outputs addressed by the bi extremal model of banker charnes cooper and schinnar banker r d a charnes w w cooper a schinnar 1981 a bi extremal principle for frontier estimation and efficiency evaluation management sci 27 december 1370 1382

hourly wage rate and taxable labor income responsiveness to changes in marginal tax rates recently a voluminous literature estimating the taxable income elasticity has emerged as an important field in empirical public economics however to a large extent it is still unknown how the hourly wage rate an important component of taxable income reacts to changes in marginal tax rates in this study we use a rich panel data set and a sequence of tax reforms that took place in sweden during the 1980 s to estimate the elasticity of the hourly wage rate with respect to the net of tax rate while carefully accounting for the endogeneity of marginal tax rates as well as other factors that determine wage rates we do find a statistically significant response both among married men and married women the hourly wage rate elasticity with respect to the net of tax rate is estimated to 0 14 0 16 for males and 0 41 0 57 for females in addition we obtain uncompensated taxable labor income elasticities of around 0 21 for men and 0 96 1 44 for women in contrast to earlier studies we also find significant income effects for males accordingly for males the compensated taxable labor income elasticity is about 4 percentage points higher than the uncompensated one

efficiency and credit rating in taiwan banking data envelopment analysis estimation in this article we use the data envelopment analysis to measure the efficiency of banks before and after credit rating is taken into consideration and we also employ the malmquist productivity index to measure the total factor productivity changes from 2001 to 2003 the results are as follows 1 there is a positive relationship between the efficiency scores and credit rating and thus the credit rating can be a representative to evaluate the performance and quality of a bank 2 we use the wilconxon two sample test of nonparametric statistic to test the influences of credit rating the empirical result shows that the credit rating is proven to influence the efficiency of banks 3 the efficiency scores improve in both investment grade above tw bbb and speculation grade under tw bbb when credit rating is taken into consideration the empirical results show that the efficiency scores of banks with a high credit rating improved relatively more when compared to banks with a lower credit rating

the employment effects of the social security earnings test we investigate the impact of the social security annual earnings test aet on the employment decisions of older americans the aet reduces social security benefits by one dollar for every two dollars earned above the exempt amount using a differences in differences design we find that the employment rate of those predicted to become subject to the aet decreases substantially relative to those not predicted to become subject to it the point estimates suggest that the aet reduces the employment rate of americans aged 63 64 by at least 1 2 percentage points

the effect of the social security earnings test on male labor supply new evidence from survey and administrative data despite numerous empirical studies there is surprisingly little agreement about whether the social security earnings test affects male labor supply in this paper we provide a comprehensive analysis of the labor supply effects of the earnings test using longitudinal administrative earnings data and more commonly used survey data we find that the response to the earnings test in survey data is obfuscated by measurement error and labor market rigidities accounting for these factors our results suggest a consistent and substantial response to the earnings test especially for younger men

the elasticity of taxable income evidence and implications abstract a central tax policy parameter that has recently received much attention but about which there is substantial uncertainty is the overall elasticity of taxable income we provide new estimates of this elasticity which address identification problems with previous work by exploiting a long panel of tax returns to study a series of tax reforms throughout the 1980s this identification strategy also allows us to provide new evidence on both the income effects of tax changes on taxable income and on variation in the elasticity of taxable income by income group we find that the overall elasticity of taxable income is approximately 0 4 the elasticity of real income not including tax preferences is much lower we estimate small income effects of tax changes on reported income implying that the compensated and uncompensated elasticities of taxable income are very similar we estimate that this overall elasticity is primarily due to a very elastic response of taxable income for taxpayers who have incomes above 100 000 per year who have an elasticity of 0 57 while for those with incomes below 100 000 per year the elasticity is less than one third as large moreover high income taxpayers who itemize are particularly responsive to taxation our estimates suggest that optimal tax structures may feature tightly targeted transfers to lower income taxpayers and a flat or even declining marginal rate structure for middle and high income taxpayers

consumption retirement and social security evaluating the efficiency of reform that encourages longer careers abstract this paper proposes and analyzes a social security reform in which individuals no longer face the oasi payroll tax after say age 54 or a career of 34 years and their subsequent earnings have no bearing on their benefits we first estimate parameters of a life cycle model our specification includes non separable preferences and possible disability it predicts a consumption expenditure change at retirement we use the magnitude of the expenditure change together with households retirement age decisions to identify key structural parameters the estimated magnitude of the change in consumption expenditure depends importantly on the treatment of consumption by adult children of the household simulations indicate that the reform could increase retirement ages one year or more equivalent variations could average more than 4000 per household and income tax revenues per household could increase by more than 14 000

international and institutional r d spillovers attribution of benefits among sources for brazil s new crop varieties reported rates of return to agricultural r d are generally high but they are likely to be biased particularly because of attribution problems mismatching research benefits with costs the importance of attribution biases is illustrated here with new evidence for brazil during 1981 2003 varietal improvements in upland rice edible beans and soybeans yielded benefits of 14 8 billion in present value 1999 prices terms attributing all of the benefits to embrapa a public research corporation accounting for more than half of brazil s agricultural r d spending the benefit cost ratio would be 78 1 under alternative attribution rules the ratio drops to 16 1

the effect of income taxation on consumption and labor supply we estimate the incentive effects of income taxation in a life cycle model of consumption and labor supply without intratemporal strong separability we find that consumption and hours worked are direct complements in utility both increase with a compensated increase in the net wage the compensated net wage elasticity is about 0 3 nearly double estimates for u s men from a linear labor supply specification estimated intertemporal elasticities indicate significant intertemporal smoothing of utility the estimated marginal welfare cost of government revenue is 6 20 which is about half the estimated welfare cost when additivity between consumption and leisure is incorrectly imposed

small is not that beautiful after all measuring the scale efficiency of tunisian high schools using a dea bootstrap method allocation of resources to schools in a centrally managed state system as the tunisian one should depend on the performance of the individual institutions the optimal size is of crucial importance in this context and we need accurate measurement for sound policies this article discusses and implements a nonparametric statistical test procedure for organization scale efficiency this procedure allows us to test whether the observed scale efficiency is optimal or not using a smooth bootstrap methodology for efficiency measures estimated using data envelopment analysis dea methods because school principals do not control for the size of their institution i e the capital available at decision time the scale efficiency measures are defined so as to include quasi fixed inputs the results show that scale efficiency measures are subject to sampling variation we also found that the schools that are scale efficient are usually mid sized and large schools when size is measured by the number of students

the indian auto component industry estimation of operational efficiency and its determinants using dea in this paper the performance analysis of the indian auto component industry is carried out from the perspectives of an original equipment manufacturer and a component supplier various efficiency measures are estimated using data envelopment analysis with publicly available financial data on a representative sample of 50 firms the first stage analysis reveals various operational inefficiencies in the auto component industry which are subsequently decomposed into technical input mix and scale efficiencies the study finds evidence that a majority of the inefficient firms are operating in the diminishing returns to scale region and demonstrates potential savings through benchmark input targets a second stage analysis aimed at exploring root causes of inefficiencies finds that substitution of labour for capital could be causing a variety of inefficiencies including the input mix inefficiency in the indian component industry the empirical results also suggest that unlike the global auto supply chain higher average inventories are required for higher operational efficiencies in the indian context contrary to the popular expectations the technology licensing does not show significant influence on efficiency at least in the short term whereas efficient working capital management does result in higher operational efficiencies the study also unearths the need to reform labour laws which are significantly contributing to various inefficiencies in the indian component industry

the incredible shrinking elasticities married female labor supply 1978 2002 this paper demonstrates the extent to which married women s labor supply elasticities have changed over the past quarter century estimates from march current population survey data suggest that these elasticities have decreased substantially by 60 percent for the hours wage elasticity from 0 36 to 0 14 70 percent for the hours income elasticity from 0 053 to 0 015 95 percent for the participation wage elasticity from 0 66 to 0 03 and 60 percent for the participation income elasticity from 0 13 to 0 05 changing demographic characteristics explain little of the drop in these elasticities suggesting that preferences toward work have changed across birth cohorts

a comparative application of data envelopment analysis and translog methods an illustrative study of hospital production this paper compares inferences about hospital cost and production correspondences from two different estimation models 1 the econometric modeling of the translog cost function and 2 the application of data envelopment analysis dea while there are numerous examples of the application of each approach to empirical data this paper provides insights into the relative strengths of the estimation methods by applying both models to the same data the translog results suggest that constant reruns are operant whereas the dea results suggest that both increasing and decreasing returns to scale may be observed in different segments of the production correspondence in turn suggesting that the translog model may be averaging diametrically opposite behavior on the other hand by examining the rate of output transformation both models agree that patient days devoted to care of children are more resource intensive than those devoted to adults or to the elderly in addition we compare estimates of technical efficiencies of individual hospitals obtained from the two methods the dea estimates are found to be highly related to the capacity utilization but no such relationship was found for the translog estimates this comparative application of different estimation models to the same data to obtain inferences about the nature of underlying cost and production correspondences sheds interesting light on the strengths of each approach and suggests the need for additional research comparing estimation models using real as well as simulated data

efficiency subsidies and environmental adaptation of animal farming under cap the purpose of this article is to model the interaction between the targets of the current cap environmental adaptation subsidies and efficiency q1 of animal farming to this end we first have to identify the production frontier and relative efficiency level for each animal oriented farm in the sample the production frontier and efficiency index for each type of farm assuming no specific production functions are identified using data envelope analysis dea techniques we then address the relationship between relative efficiency farm size and environmentally friendly behavior by carrying out a nonparametric regression of efficiency on economic size a proxy for the degree of environmental appropriateness and regional dummies calculations of the efficiency of the farms including direct subsidies are compared with the counterfactual exercise in the case in which direct subsidies are not considered finally we look for relations between subsidies and factors such as farm size efficiency and environmentally friendly behavior one key result shows that on average direct payments generally tend to increase efficiency however in most of the cases the mean efficiency decreases as the percentage of direct payments rises direct payments are found to be positively related to environmentally friendly production at least in germany however in general the direct payment system is not sufficient to offset the fact that the less environmentally friendly farms as well as the larger farms are more efficient

malmquist type indices in the presence of negative data an application to bank branches in this paper we develop an index and an indicator of productivity change that can be used with negative data for that purpose the range directional model rdm a particular case of the directional distance function is used for computing efficiency in the presence of negative data we use rdm efficiency measures to arrive at a malmquist type index which can reflect productivity change and we use rdm inefficiency measures to arrive at a luenberger productivity indicator and relate the two the productivity index and indicator are developed relative to a fixed meta technology and so they are referred to as a meta malmquist index and meta luenberger indicator we also address the fact that vrs technologies are used for computing the productivity index and indicator a requirement under negative data which raises issues relating to the interpretability of the index we illustrate how the meta malmquist index can be used not only for comparing the performance of a unit in two time periods but also for comparing the performance of two different units at the same or different time periods the proposed approach is then applied to a sample of bank branches where negative data were involved the paper shows how the approach yields information from a variety of perspectives on performance which management can use

the labor supply effects of the social security earnings test the social security earnings test taxes away benefits at a 33 50 rate once earnings pass a threshold amount i investigate the response to three past changes in the earnings test rules each applying to some age groups and not others i find that beneficiaries bunch in substantial numbers just below the earnings threshold and the bunching shifts when the earnings test rules change these shifts in the budget constraint are incorporated into an econometric model to identify income and substitution effects the estimation yields significant elasticities that suggest considerable deadweight loss suffered by working beneficiaries

economic efficiency and frontier techniques abstract most of the literature related to the measurement of economic efficiency has based its analysis either on parametric or on non parametric frontier methods the choice of estimation method has been an issue of debate with some researchers preferring the parametric and others the non parametric approach the aim of this paper is to provide a critical and detailed review of both core frontier methods in our opinion no approach is strictly preferable to any other moreover a careful consideration of their main advantages and disadvantages of the data set utilized and of the intrinsic characteristics of the framework under analysis will help us in the correct implementation of these techniques recent developments in frontier techniques and economic efficiency measurement such as bayesian techniques bootstrapping duality theory and the analysis of sampling asymptotic properties are also considered in this paper

the evolution and main determinants of productivity in brazilian electricity distribution 1998 2005 an empirical analysis abstract this paper estimates changes in the productivity of the brazilian electricity distribution sector using data envelopment analysis dea on a panel of 18 firms from 1998 to 2005 the study decomposes the productivity change of these distribution firms in terms of technical efficiency scale efficiency and technical progress this exercise aims to help the understanding of the main determinants of the evolution of productivity focusing its relationship with the restructuring process implemented in the 1990s tfp index records a yearly positive growth rate of 1 3 in the whole period under analysis for all firms technical change was the main component behind this evolution with an average growth of 2 1 per year while technical efficiency presented a yearly negative performance of 0 8 the results prove that in general terms the incentives generated in the reform process do not seem to have led the firms to behave in a more efficient manner

health insurance eligibility utilization of medical care and child health two economists applied data from the current population survey and the national health interview survey and state level data on child mortality to a simulation model of utilization of medical care that varies only with the states legislative environment to examine the utilization of medical care and health effects of medicaid eligibility on low income children the models took into consideration the recent expansions of medicaid to low income children 38 of those ineligible for medicaid in 1984 who became eligible due to changes during 1984 1992 were uninsured between 1984 and 1992 expansions of the medicaid program increased the proportion of children eligible for medicaid almost two fold 16 1 vs 31 2 yet coverage rates were always lower than eligibility rates 13 2 vs 16 1 in 1984 and 20 3 vs 31 2 in 1992 and the increase in coverage rates was only about 50 of the increase in eligibility rates during 1984 1992 the probability that a child was eligible for medicaid increased the probability of health insurance coverage by 29 77 when the model considered bias in variables e g a recession in a state the take up rate was only 22 73 nevertheless medicaid markedly increased use of medical care for example eligibility for medicaid increased the likelihood of making a visit to a physicians office in the last two weeks by about 50 it also increased the probability of a child visiting the hospital suggesting inefficiency in the way that providers deliver care to medicaid enrollees medicaid eligibility had a significant effect on reducing child mortality the 15 1 percentage point increase in eligibility during 1984 1992 reduced child mortality by 4 5 when the researchers examined parent assessed subjective health measures medicaid eligibility had no effect on child health medicaid eligibility reduced race and education based disparities in the number of visits and racial differences in mortality yet it may actually intensify current disparities in health care delivery site

welfare the earned income tax credit and the labor supply of single mothers during 1984 1996 welfare and tax policy were changed to encourage work by single mothers the earned income tax credit was expanded welfare benets were cut welfare time limits were added and welfare cases were terminated medicaid for the working poor was expanded as were training programs and child care during this same time period there were unprecedented increases in the employment and hours of single mothers we show that a large share of the increase in work by single mothers can be attributed to the eitc and other tax changes with smaller shares for welfare benet cuts welfare waivers training programs and child care programs