spurious volatility in historical unemployment data this paper shows that the stabilization of the unemployment rate between the pre 1930 and post 1948 eras is an artifact of improvements in data collection procedures prewar methods are used to construct postwar unemployment data that are consistent with the historical data the constructed postwar series is nearly as volatile as the pre 1930 unemployment data the constructed postwar data are systematically more volatile than the actual postwar data because the cyclical behavior of the labor force and productivity are misspecified in the construction procedures the relationship between the actual and constructed postwar unemployment series is used to construct new historical data

a cost malmquist productivity index capturing group performance this paper develops an index for comparing the productivity of groups of operating units in cost terms when input prices are available in that sense it represents an extension of a similar index available in the literature for comparing groups of units in terms of technical productivity in the absence of input prices the index is decomposed to reveal the origins of differences in performance of the groups of units both in terms of technical and cost productivity the index and its decomposition are of value in contexts where the need arises to compare units which perform the same function but they can be grouped by virtue of the fact that they operate in different contexts as might for example arise in comparisons of water or gas transmission companies operating in different countries

effects of free choice among public schools in this paper i investigate the impact of a programme in tel aviv israel that terminated an existing inter district busing integration programme and allowed students free choice among public schools the identification is based on difference in differences and regression discontinuity designs that yield various alternative comparison groups drawn from untreated tangent neighbourhoods and adjacent cities across identification methods and comparison groups the results consistently suggest that choice significantly reduces the drop out rate and increases the cognitive achievements of high school students it also improves behavioural outcomes such as teacher student relationships and students social acclimation and satisfaction at school and reduces the level of violence and classroom disruption

expenditures and receipts testing for causality in state and local government finances the results of our tests indicate similarities between the expenditure tax receipt relations of state governments to those previously reported for the federal government in manage and marlow 1986 the results reported here indicate support for the hypothesis that tax receipts cause expenditures at the state level of government for tests utilizing symmetric lag structures ranging from three to five years state expenditures appear to follow state tax receipts for the shortest lag length 2 2 the determination of bidirectional causality does not make us reject the hypothesis that higher spending levels result from higher revenue levels rather the causality appears to be in both directions for the shortest lag length

redistribution of funds for teaching and research among universities the case of north rhine westphalia abstract this paper reports on a real application of a performance and success based system for redistribution of funds for teaching and research among universities in north rhine westphalia after a precise description of the decision situation we show how goal programming and distance minimization were applied in order to find a solution on the basis of real data some comments on the results and the quality of the redistribution process conclude the paper

optimum subsidies for education in two sector economies abstract this note presents a view on educational subsidies based on the recognition that educational cost is a kind of turnover cost from unskilled to skilled labor the level of optimum educational subsidies is given for three types of two sector economies a pure two sector economy economy of income sharings in the traditional sector economy with unemployment in the manufactural sector

side effects of nonlinear profit taxes in an evolutionary market entry model abrupt changes coexisting attractors and hysteresis problems in order to demonstrate that nonlinear tax systems may have surprising and potentially undesirable side effects we develop an evolutionary market entry model in which firms decide on the basis of past profit opportunities whether or not to enter a competitive market our main focus is on the case of a proportional tax on positive profits such a piecewise linear tax scheme induces a kink in the firms profit functions and may lead to abrupt changes in a market s dynamics coexisting attractors and hysteresis problems since these phenomena can also be observed in more general models a proper understanding of their basic mechanism may be helpful to explain the intricate behavior of many economic systems

performance indicators in higher education a survey of recent work this article surveys recent work on the construction of performance indicators in higher education focusing particular attention on degree results student wastage and research output performance indicators ought to provide measures of value added by the various institutions under review as such crude measures of output which fail to take account of input differences across institutions are inappropriate so it is necessary to investigate what factors underlie inter institution differences in measured output in order to correct for input variations in assessing overall performance the absence of market prices for teaching and research outputs severely hinders the construction of composite measures of the performance of higher education institutions since in their absence no objective weights can be assigned to the different roles of these institutions the resource implications of performance measurement exercises need to be clarified if rankings exercises are to have the desired incentive effects copyright 1992 by oxford university press

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

measuring energy efficiency in the context of an emerging economy the case of indian manufacturing in recent years the indian economy has achieved a rapid growth rate however one of the challenges facing the economy is the large energy supply that would be needed to sustain this growth path hence attaining energy efficiency is crucial for the economy this paper examines the indian manufacturing sector and utilizes a variant of the directional distance function to obtain comprehensive measures of performance of the major manufacturing states given the joint goals of achieving energy conservation and output growth the results of the empirical application reveal that given the prevailing technology the average manufacturing firm across the states could reduce energy input and increase output simultaneously by an annual average of 3 84 by improving technical efficiency to accommodate a larger simultaneous increase in output and reduction in energy use india should adopt superior technologies so as to shift the efficient frontier outward

efficiency and equity in private and public education a nonparametric comparison we present a nonparametric approach for 1 efficiency and 2 equity evaluation in education firstly we use a nonparametric data envelopment analysis model that is specially tailored to assess educational efficiency at the pupil level the model accounts for the fact that typically minimal prior structure is available for the behavior objectives and feasibility set under evaluation it allows for uncertainty in the data while it corrects for exogenous environmental characteristics that are specific to each pupil secondly we propose two multidimensional stochastic dominance criteria as naturally complementary aggregation criteria for comparing the performance of different school types private and public schools while the first criterion only accounts for efficiency the second criterion also takes equity into consideration the model is applied for comparing private but publicly funded and public primary schools in flanders our application finds that no school type robustly dominates another type when controlling for the school environment and taking equity into account more generally it demonstrates the usefulness of our nonparametric approach which includes environmental and equity considerations for obtaining fair performance comparisons in the public sector context

the cost structure of american research universities 1597 this study estimates translog variable cost functions for 147 american doctorate granting universities accounting for three major products of these institutions undergraduate and graduate instruction and research explicit measures of research output and quality are employed evidence is found for considerable economies of scale for the average institution as well as economies of scope related to the joint production of undergraduate and graduate instruction the public or private ownership of an institution is not significant for the explanation of variable costs the intensity of state regulation in the public sector does not have a significant impact on production efficiency copyright 1991 by mit press

ranking intervals and dominance relations for ratio based efficiency analysis we develop comparative results for ratio based efficiency analysis rea based on the decision making units dmus relative efficiencies over sets of feasible weights that characterize preferences for input and output variables specifically we determine i ranking intervals which indicate the best and worst efficiency rankings that a dmu can attain relative to other dmus ii dominance relations which show what other dmus a given dmu dominates in pairwise efficiency comparisons and iii efficiency bounds which show how much more efficient a given dmu can be relative to some other dmu or a subset of other dmus unlike conventional efficiency scores these results are insensitive to outlier dmus they also show how the dmus efficiency ratios relate to each other for all feasible weights rather than for those weights only for which the data envelopment analysis dea efficiency score of some dmu is maximized we illustrate the usefulness of these results by revisiting reported dea studies and by describing a recent case study on the efficiency comparison of university departments this paper was accepted by teck hua ho decision analysis

on the performance of universities in north rhine westphalia germany government s redistribution of funds judged using dea efficiency measures abstract in fandel and gal 2001 fandel g gal t 2001 redistribution of funds for teaching and research among universities the case of north rhine westphalia european journal of operational research 130 111 120 a solution for a real process of redistributing funds for teaching and research among the universities in north rhine westphalia in germany according to specific criteria was presented the solution was based on aggregated proportional data and was determined by a negotiation process now that the absolute data with respect to the different subject areas of the universities are available it is studied to which extent the results of the redistribution can be justified by the relative efficiency measures using data envelopment analysis moreover the inefficiencies or slacks respectively in the usage of personnel give reasons to reallocate the staff among the universities or to reduce it correspondingly

evaluating the productive performance of uk universities as cost constrained revenue maximizers an empirical analysis the study presents an empirical analysis of the relative revenue efficiency of uk universities in providing teaching and research with government policies pressurizing the largely public funded universities to secure efficiency in both input usage and output revenue university producers are modelled as cost constrained revenue maximizers taking explicit account of the quality of research output the methodology uses linear programming techniques to construct nonparametric cost indirect production frontiers and to compute revenue efficiency relative to these frontiers revenue efficiency is then decomposed into its output allocative and technical components further analysis investigates the sources of allocative and technical inefficiencies

reaganomics and the use of collective rebates the purpose of this article was to demonstrate that a collective rebate can be an effective tool to reduce excessive government the idea is that the general public can be aroused to vote for and support political agendas that reduce government intervention bunching many pro competitive policies in one package a collective rebate offers an opportunity to turn the public against the special interests an attempt was made to extend the collective rebate principle to the fiscal policy employed by the regan administration with all of its faults notwithstanding it was shown that this fiscal policy could be interpreted as a successful application of the collective rebate principle

modelling the transition from school and the demand for training in the united kingdom this paper analyses the choices made by school leavers and the demand for training in the youth labour market using a large cross section database on all school leavers in lancashire in 1991 we model using a multinomial logit their first destination six months after the end of compulsory schooling we model six choices outcomes non vocational continuing education vocational continuing education youth training employment with on the job training employment with general skills training and unemployment our results show that the first destination from school is affected by a range of individual school and local labour market variables in addition to academic ability we report three effects that are not well known a young person is more likely to leave school the bigger the school the lower its academic performance and the lower his or her expected lifetime earnings our results might be interpreted as evidence of a segmented youth labour market it is also inappropriate to model the decision to stay on in continuing education as a simple binary choice

operational research in education operational research or techniques have been applied from the early stages of the discipline to a wide variety of issues in education at the government level these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions how to measure it and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings local governments as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation may also need to make decisions regarding for example the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones as well as the day to day logistics of getting pupils to schools issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses this survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government managers and consumers of education and the or techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

fiscal decentralization and government size numerous studies have attempted to model the possible factors contributing to universal growth in public sectors this paper analyzes one device that appears capable of controlling some of that growth fiscal decentralization the results reported here also support the use of monopoly government assumptions in models of public policy

on the determinants of school district efficiency competition and monitoring abstract a number of researchers have asserted that inefficiency in the u s school system arises from a lack of incentives for public schools to behave efficiently this paper uses a shephard input distance function to model educational production and a switching regressions estimation to explore the relationship between school district efficiency and two existing incentive mechanisms competition and voter monitoring we find evidence that ease of monitoring enhances both technical and allocative efficiency of urban school districts and that increased competition reduces allocative inefficiency in communities above a competitive threshold we find no evidence that competition is related to technical inefficiency

a cautious price adjustment mechanism chaotic behavior abstract it is well known that adjustment processes like tatonnement can show erratic dynamic behavior the prices can make big jumps and vary over a wide range a discrete tatonnement process in a simple two goods economy is studied with only one price adjusted it is shown that the interval in which the price varies can be restricted to a neighborhood of an equilibrium price with big jumps excluded if the relative price adjustment is restricted by a maximal rate of increase or decrease of the price within the interval any type of erratic dynamics remains possible

controlling leviathan through tax reduction our paper seeks the strategy that allows the greatest ability to reduce public sector size within a political environment that does not want us to directly set limits on public sector size tax reduction through its quid pro quo effect offers high tangibility to taxpayers and may raise political power of groups that seek both tax reduction and greater opposition to lobbies that seek spending increases for their narrowly defined interests moreover as manage and marlow 1986 argues since the political response to balanced budget rules is likely to raise taxes this political bias of tax hikes suggests that balanced budget rules are offered as a means of changing the funding mix and not the actual budget constraint of government

modeling multiple outputs in educational production functions for some time now economists have conceptualized learning as a production process most educational production functions specify only one output usually a measure of cognitive achievement some recent studies have recognized the multidimensional aspects of schooling specifying outputs in both the cognitive and affective domains introducing multiple outputs into the production function raises interesting theoretical and empirical issues one issue is the manner in which various outputs are interrelated how one models output interactions in educational production functions may be important are the outputs multiple products if so are they independently or simultaneously produced or are the outputs joint products answers to these questions may affect empirical estimates of the educational production function s this paper briefly describes how one might approach this problem we argue on conceptual grounds that modeling outputs in the cognitive and affective domains as joint products is preferable in addition we compare the three approaches empirically to evaluate the sensitivity of educational production function parameter estimates to output specification

institutions of higher education as multi product firms economies of scale and scope a multiple output cost function is estimated for institutions of higher education in the united states employing data for 1981 82 the authors flexible fixed cost quadratic function includes three outputs undergraduate teaching graduate teaching and research grants and one input price average faculty salaries results indicate the existence of scope economies at least up to a point for both public and private institutions of higher education ray economies of scale are more pronounced in the private sector and product specific economies of scale are observed only in the public sector for research and graduate teaching copyright 1989 by mit press

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

government spending and taxation what causes what in the past few years as federal deficits have risen to high nominal levels economists have argued about the effect that raising taxes ostensibly to reduce deficits might have on government spending some economists including milton friedman have argued that raising taxes will simply lead to more spending others including james buchanan and richard wagner have said that the high deficits themselves have been responsible for the growth of federal spending and that if that spending had to be financed completely by direct taxes people would demand that the federal government spend less a third group led by robert barro says that increased taxes and borrowing are results of increased government spending in section ii we briefly review various hypotheses about the relationship between federal government spending and revenues section iii describes the testing procedure used to discriminate between these hypotheses the results of four tests are presented in section iv section v contains a summary and major conclusions to foreshadow what follows we find no evidence that higher real federal taxes today lead to either higher or lower federal spending tomorrow on the other hand we find strong evidence that higher spending now will lead to higher taxes later our results support a view of the world in which the political system somehow determines how much to spend and then looks for revenue sources to finance that level of spending including direct taxation borrowing and money creation we also find evidence that real federal revenues are positively affected by real gross national product gnp real federal spending also rises with real gnp but it appears to be independent of the rate of inflation

costs efficiency and economies of scale and scope in the english higher education sector an understanding of the production and cost technology of higher education institutions is of considerable policy interest as it motivates the structure of the sector how large universities should be and what mix of outputs they should produce we review the literature and using data for english institutions in 2013 14 apply appropriate frontier methods to model the structure of costs in this diverse sector in doing so we uncover information about the returns to scale and scope within the higher education sector in particular the class of institutions comprising larger research intensive universities and small specialist institutions could benefit from further concentrating postgraduate and research activity we find that the universities comprising the english higher education sector are largely efficient measured relative to observed practices and that there is little scope for gains in technical efficiency from allocating resources on the basis of efficiency scores

comparing school ownership performance using a pseudo panel database a malmquist type index approach in this paper we propose a different way of using the malmquist index that allows us to further analyze the relative performance divergences between two groups of decision making units dmus over time when only a pseudo panel database is available to do this we extend the camanho and dyson 2006 one period malmquist type index cdmi for a pseudo panel database with a new pseudo panel malmquist index ppmi to illustrate the methodology we apply it to examine how the performance gap between public and private government dependent secondary schools in the basque country spain performed across three pisa waves 2006 2009 and 2012 the results suggest that performance is persistently and significantly higher for private government dependent schools than for public schools

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

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

inflation deflation expectations and economic stability in a kaleckian system abstract in this paper we analyze the impact of inflation deflation expectations and the effect of the monetary authority s inflation targeting policy in a kaleckian system on the basis of macro foundation approaches for this purpose we build a dynamical system composed of four variables the rate of utilization the wage share the nominal rate of interest and the expected rate of inflation and examine the properties especially stability of this dynamical system we then find that the existence of adaptive inflation deflation expectations always destabilizes our kaleckian system irrespective of the revision speed of expectations while that the monetary authority s intensive inflation targeting policy can make the system stable but the effect of this policy depends heavily upon the public credibility of it we also perform numerical simulations to check that our analysis is valid

global stability condition on the plane a general law of demand abstract it is well known that global stability of competitive equilibrium obtains only under quite stringent restrictions this paper identifies a set of restrictions which may be interpreted as a very weak form of the so called law of demand and shows how this may imply global stability for motion on the plane it is also of some interest that this condition is satisfied by a perturbed version of the celebrated scarf example which does not satisfy existing conditions for global stability

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

quasi markets and social policy introduction j le grand w bartlett the theory of quasi markets w bartlett j le grand quasi markets contracts and quality in health and social care the us experience c propper quasi markets and the nhs reforms l harrison w bartlett quasi markets and the reform of community care l hoyes r means quasi markets and educational reforms w bartlett the quasi market in social housing g bramley quasi markets and regulation c propper quasi markets and social policy the way forward j le grand w bartlett references index

choice competition and pupil achievement choice and competition in education have recently found growing support from both policy makers and academics yet evidence on the actual benefits of market orientated reforms is at best mixed moreover although the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear in existing work there is rarely an attempt to distinguish between the two concepts in this paper we study whether pupils in primary schools in england with a wider range of school choices achieve better academic outcomes than those whose choice is more limited and whether primary schools facing more competition perform better than those in a more monopolistic situation in simple least squares regression models we find little evidence of a link between choice and achievement but uncover a small positive association between competition and school performance yet this could be related to endogenous school location or pupil sorting in fact an instrumental variable strategy based on discontinuities generated by admissions district boundaries suggests that the performance gains from greater school competition are limited only when we restrict our attention to voluntary aided schools which have more freedom in managing their governance and admission practices do we find some evidence of a positive causal link between competition and pupil achievement jel i20 h70 r5

a robust rational route to randomness in a simple asset pricing model abstract we investigate asset pricing dynamics in an adaptive evolutionary asset pricing model with fundamentalists trend followers and a market maker agents can choose between a fundamentalist strategy at positive information cost or choose a trend following strategy for free price adjustment is proportional to the excess demand in the asset market agents asynchronously update their strategy according to realized net profits in the recent past as agents become more sensitive to differences in strategy performance the fundamental steady state becomes unstable and multiple steady states may arise as the traders sensitivity to differences in fitness increases a bifurcation route to chaos sets in due to homoclinic bifurcations of stable and unstable manifolds of the fundamental steady state

global stability in a class of markets with three commodities and three consumers abstract the paper gives an estimate of the fraction of initial endowment distributions which result in global stability of a t tonnement process for a class of economies which includes the scarf instability example as a limiting case the measure of such a fraction for our class of economies is necessarily larger than or equal to the corresponding measure for the scarf example itself

do peer groups matter peer group versus schooling effects on academic attainment this paper estimates an educational production function educational attainment is a function of peer group parental input and schooling conventional measures of school quality are not good predictors for academic attainment once we control for peer group effects parental qualities also have strong effects on academic attainment this academic attainment is a then a key determinant of subsequent labour market success as measured by earnings the main methodological innovation in this paper is the nomination of a set of instruments very broad regions of birth which as a whole pass close scrutiny for validity and permit unbiased estimation of the production function

measuring teaching efficiency in higher education an application of data envelopment analysis to economics graduates from uk universities 1993 data envelopment analysis dea is applied to 2547 economics graduates from uk universities in 1993 in order to assess teaching efficiency following a methodology developed by education economics 10 2 2002 183 207 each individual s efficiency is decomposed into two components one attributable to the university at which the student studied and the other attributable to the student himself from the former component a measure of each institution s teaching efficiency is derived and compared to efficiency scores derived from a conventional dea applied using each economics department as a decision making unit dmu the results suggest that efficiencies derived from deas performed at an aggregate level include both institution and individual components and are therefore misleading thus the unit of analysis in a dea is highly important moreover an analysis at the individual level can give institutions insight into whether it is the students own efforts or the institution s efficiency which are a constraint on increased efficiency this has implications for the choice of strategy for improving efficiency

a note on the global stability condition of price adjustment processes on the plane abstract in mukherji global stability condition on the plane a general law of demand j econ theory 134 2007 583 592 a set of sufficient conditions for global stability of price adjustment processes on the plane is identified the aim of this note is to point out that one of the conditions can be dropped

combining the assumptions of variable and constant returns to scale in the efficiency evaluation of secondary schools our paper reports on the use of data envelopment analysis dea for the assessment of performance of secondary schools in malaysia during the implementation of the policy of teaching and learning mathematics and science subjects in the english language ppsmi the novelty of our application is that it makes use of the hybrid returns to scale hrs dea model this combines the assumption of constant returns to scale with respect to quantity inputs and outputs teaching provision and students and variable returns to scale vrs with respect to quality factors attainment levels on entry and exit and socio economic status of student families we argue that the hrs model is a better informed model than the conventional vrs model in the described application because the hrs technology is larger than the vrs technology the new model provides a tangibly better discrimination on efficiency than could be obtained by the vrs model to assess the productivity change of secondary schools over the years surrounding the introduction of the ppsmi policy we adapt the malmquist productivity index and its decomposition to the case of hrs model

reputation and efficiency a non parametric assessment of america s top rated mba programs abstract widely publicized reports of fresh mbas getting multiple job offers with six figure annual salaries leave a long lasting general impression about the high quality of selected business schools while such spectacular achievement in job placement rightly deserves recognition one should not lose sight of the resources expended in order to accomplish this result in this study we employ a measure of pareto koopmans global efficiency to evaluate the efficiency levels of the mba programs in business week s top rated list we compute input and output oriented radial and non radial efficiency measures for comparison among three tier groups the schools from a higher tier group on average are more efficient than those from lower tiers although variations in efficiency levels do occur within the same tier which exist over different measures of efficiency

privatization and government size a budget constraint view of government shows that privatization need not alter spending when it is implemented without a rule forbidding re use of the funding backing newly privatized programs only when these funds are eliminated from the budget process e g tax rebates or permanent deficit reduction can these funds not back new programs or expand existing programs this is an important caveat since privatization proposals do not contain such rules with such rules privatization can increase allocational efficiency and lead to smaller government size

performance assessment in higher education in britain all public sector organisations in the uk have witnessed changes in funding arrangements during the 1980s as part of the government s drive to make them more accountable to the tax payer the development of performance indicators is seen as an essential step to ensure that such organisations provide value for money this paper examines the possibility of constructing measures of the performance of uk universities a methodology is developed in the framework of production theory and uses multiple regression techniques to estimate the relationship between the outputs and inputs of universities around 80 of the inter university variation in four output measures can be explained by corresponding variations in several input measures this highlights the need to take into account the inputs available to a university when comparing its output performance with that achieved by other institutions the problems of interpreting an array of performance indicators are also clearly demonstrated

subject mix and productivity in portuguese universities abstract recent changes in higher education especially associated with its massification have led to calls for more accountability and to an increasing need to evaluate universities performance however comparing universities with different subject mixes poses some significant problems in this article a linear mixed effect model methodology allowing for random effects at university level is used to measure the productivity of portuguese public universities taking into account their subject composition for a period of five years 1997 2001 the results show that subject mix is an important factor in explaining the variability in productivity between universities however even taking account of subject mix a lot of inefficiency is found in the system and a significant variability in productivity among universities exists

stability and complex dynamics in a discrete tâtonnement model abstract in this paper we study the dynamics of discrete price adjustment processes we show that gross substitutability leads to a kind of stability of the process it guarantees that all prices converge to some bounded region that contains the unique equilibrium price the dynamics inside this region is by no means trivial we demonstrate that as the speed of adjustment increases the process undergoes several bifurcations and the dynamics may become quite complex our approach differs from other literature on t tonnement processes in that our systems are not necessarily one dimensional

a discrete and symmetric price adjustment process on the simplex abstract we study the t tonnement process in an exchange economy with three commodities and three agents we argue that for the multiplicative t tonnement process the simplex is a natural normalization rule we analyse the influence of symmetry in preferences and endowments on the dynamics of the t tonnement process depending on this symmetry there are different bifurcation routes to chaos in particular coexisting attractors may emerge when the symmetric equilibrium price vector becomes unstable this coexistence of attractors is robust in the sense that it also exists for close by asymmetric t tonnement processes

global instability in experimental general equilibrium the scarf example scarf 1960 proposed a market environment and a model of dynamic adjustment in which the standard tatonnement price adjustment process orbits around rather than converges to the competitive equilibrium hirota 1981 characterized the price paths by the configuration of endowments we explore the predictions of scarf s model in a nontatonnement experimental double auction we find that the average transaction prices in each period do follow the path predicted by the scarf and hirota models when the model predicts prices will converge to the competitive equilibrium our data converge when the model predicts prices will orbit our data orbit the equilibrium and in the direction predicted by the model moreover we observe a weak tendency for prices within a period to follow the path predicted by the model

the economic returns to an mba because mba programs require work experience before admittance prior wages can be exploited to disentangle the return to the degree from unobserved productivity we find that controlling for individual fixed effects generally reduces the estimated returns to an mba particularly for those in top programs however for full time mba students attending schools outside of the top 25 the estimated returns are higher when we control for individual fixed effects we show that there is some evidence that those who take the gmat but do not obtain an mba are stronger in dimensions such as workplace skills that are not easily measured

the causal relation between federal expenditures and receipts federal expenditures have consistently exceeded federal revenues since 1970 in fact the federal government has seen a surplus in only five years since 1950 the symptoms of such fiscal imbalance are of course budget deficits while budget deficits are nothing new in u s history the recent and projected size of the deficit during peacetime nonrecessionary years has been the cause of much concern to academics the news media and politicians this preoccupation with federal deficits has produced a variety of policy proposals to deal with them

statistical dynamics and economics abstract it is shown in this paper how complex economic dynamics can be characterized using the statistical or distributional theory of dynamical systems the basic concepts of the latter are summarized then applications to supply and demand adjustments in competitive markets aggregate business fluctuations and economic growth in the very long run are briefly reviewed

could do better the effectiveness of incentives and competition in schools this paper studies the eects of incentive mechanisms and of the competitive environment on the interaction between schools and stu dents in a set up where their eort aects the students educational attainment we show that increasing the power of the incentive scheme and the eectiveness of competition may have the counterintuitive ef fect of lowering the students attainment in a simple dynamic set up where the reputation of the schools aects recruitment we show that increased competition leads to segregation of pupils by ability

the determinants of off budget activity of state and local governments the primary finding of this paper is that the off budget activity of the public sector is significantly and positively related to on budget activity by state and local governments we suggest the following policy implications one there appears to be evidence that the composition of total government activity is related to the relative costs of the alternative avenues of providing governmental activity future research into determining the nature of the relative cost differences may be one useful means of understanding both the composition of government activity as well as its total size two our ability to measure the true size of public sector participation in the economy must go well beyond our attempt here while we have presented information on one of the important hidden elements of public sector participation we are still a long way from effectively incorporating similar data on legislation regulations and so forth into our empirical tests further research into these issues is clearly warranted

subsidies for higher education who should pay the resource costs of higher education this paper investigates a simple model of the general equilibrium of the labor market with three skill levels those in the population with the lower level of intelligence and or sophistication can only become low skilled workers but the brighter segment of the population can become either high or medium skilled workers given the tax structure the welfare of each group is maximized by a unique subsidy rate on the cost of training high skilled workers under several circumstances the lower iq group wants a higher subsidy rate than will the group that benefits directly from the training

econometric efficiency analysis a policy oriented review abstract the econometric approach to the construction of production cost and other frontiers and the measurement of efficiency relative to these frontiers historically has had a strong policy orientation this distinguishes the approach from the mathematical programming approach which has had a managerial decision making orientation geared to solving allocation problems within the public or private organization in this paper i review the development of the econometric approach to efficiency analysis i then discuss a small number of empirical studies chosen to illustrate the application of the econometric approach to a collection of public policy issues for which the notion of efficiency measurement is of prime importance examples are drawn from the areas of 1 agricultural productivity 2 labor market efficiency and equity 3 the measurement of the standard of living 4 the establishment of quality of service standards and 5 the valuation of environmental disamenities

the effect of competition on the efficiency of secondary schools in england abstract in this paper we calculate the technical efficiencies based upon multiple outputs school exam performance and attendance rates of all secondary schools in england over the period 1993 1998 we then estimate models to examine the determinants of efficiency in a particular year and the determinants of the change in efficiency over the period our results suggest that the greater the degree of competition between schools the more efficient they are the strength of this effect has also increased over time which is consistent with the evolution of the quasi market in secondary education competition is also found to be an important determinant of the change in efficiency over time there is however some evidence of conditional convergence between schools

the demand for education under capital market imperfections this paper studies the theoretical implications of the demand for education assuming the same regime for financing consumption and the direct costs of education when the capital market is not perfect it is motivated by the policy concerns on the financing of post secondary education in case of an imperfect capital market the separation theorem see e g wallace and ihnen 1975 is not valid and the theoretical implications substantially deviate from their counterparts under a perfect capital market regime for example in a capital market with credit rationing the borrowing rate exerts a positive effect on the demand for education whereas this effect is negative in case of a perfect capital market the theoretical results are used to discuss the effects of government policy on the demand for post compulsory education

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

school quality and black white relative earnings a direct assessment the wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980 it has been argued that this convergence reflects improvements in the relative quality of black schools to test this hypothesis we assembled data on pupil teacher ratios annual teacher pay and term length for black and white schools in the eighteen segregated states from 1915 to 1966 these data are linked to estimated returns to education for southern born men from different cohorts and states in 1960 1970 and 1980 improvements in the relative quality of black schools explain 20 percent of the narrowing of the black white earnings gap between 1960 and 1980

multiple equilibria and chaos in a discrete tâtonnement process the purpose of this note is to demonstrate a sufficient condition for a discrete t tonnement process to lead to chaos in a general equilibrium model with multiple commodities the result indicates that as the speed of price adjustment increases the discrete t tonnement process is complex in a general equilibrium economy in which there are multiple equilibria

measures of technical efficiency abstract fare and lovell j econom theory 19 1978 150 162 suggest four properties that a measure of technical efficiency should satisfy the commonly employed debreu farrell measure fails three of them necessary and sufficient conditions for a measure to satisfy the four conditions are provided and recently proposed measures are analyzed in the light of this result also it is argued that the debreu farrell measure has several desirable properties when one takes account of 1 perhaps unknown market prices and the relationship between technical and economic efficiency and 2 its characterization as a measure of economic efficiency using the shadow prices implicit in the production technology

efficiency measurement in the stochastic frontier model abstract deterministic models of technical efficiency assume that all deviations from the production frontier are due to inefficiency critics argue that no allowance is made for measurement error and other statistical noise so that the resulting efficiency measure will be contaminated the stochastic frontier model is an alternative that allows both inefficiency and measurement error advocates argue that the stochastic frontier models should be used despite other potential limitations because of the superior conceptual treatment of noise as will be demonstrated in this paper however the assumed shape of the error distributions is used to identify a key production function parameter therefore the stochastic frontier models like the deterministic models cannot produce absolute measures of efficiency moreover we show that rankings for firm specific inefficiency estimates produced by traditional stochastic frontier models do not change from the rankings of the composed errors as a result the performance of the deterministic models is qualitatively similar to that of the stochastic frontier models