short term inflation expectations evidence from a monthly survey note the assumption that economic agents have rational expectations is commonplace in studies of macroeconomic policy and asset market behavior research examining observable expectations from surveys however has generally found that the data reject the rational expectations hypothesis friedman 1980 reports that forecasts of long term interest rates from surveys of financial market participants are not rational figlewski and wachtel 1981 note that most investigators of the livingston survey data on economists inf lation expectations conclude that these data do not conform to the rational expectations hypothesis british survey data on the inflation expectations of consumers analyzed by evans and gulamani 1984 and on the inflation expectations of business firms examined by pesaran 1985 also appear inconsistent with rational expectations the failure of survey data to pass tests of rationality have led researchers such as mishkin 1983 to question the usefulness of survey data to proxy expectations this paper examines a different source of expectations data namely the surveys of money market participants conducted by money market services inc mms data from the mms surveys have been widely used in studies of how asset prices respond to unanticipated changes in economic variables recent papers by urich and wachtel 1984 pearce and roley 1985 and smirlock 1986 employ the median predicted inflation rate from the mms survey to construct a measure of the unexpected component of inflation announcements

measuring economic efficiency with incomplete price information with an application to european commercial banks measuring economic efficiency requires complete price information while resorting to technical efficiency exclusively does not allow one to utilise any price information in most studies at least some information on the prices is available from theory or practical knowledge of the industry under evaluation in this paper we extend the theory of efficiency measurement to accommodate incomplete price information by deriving upper and lower bounds for farrell s overall economic efficiency the bounds typically give a better approximation for economic efficiency than technical efficiency measures that use no price data whatsoever from an operational point of view we derive new data envelopment analysis dea models for computing these bounds using standard linear programming the practical application of these estimators is illustrated with an empirical application to large european union commercial banks

are small or large producers driving the canada u s labour productivity gap recent evidence from manufacturing this paper shows that the higher small plant employment share in canada compared with the united states mattered for the canada u s manufacturing labour productivity gap but it did not contribute to the widening of the gap between 2002 and 2007 in addition it shows that while the weaker productivity performance of small plants in canada compared with the united states accounted for much of the gap in a particular year the deterioration in the productivity performance of large plants in canada was responsible for most of the widening gap over this period resume est ce que les petits ou les grands producteurs conforment l ecart de productivite du travail entre le canada et les etats unis resultats recents pour le secteur manufacturier ce texte montre que la plus grande portion de l emploi dans les petits etablissements au canada par rapport aux etats unis est importante dans l explication de la difference de niveau de productivite du travail entre le canada et les etats unis mais que ce facteur n a pas contribue a l accroissement de l ecart entre 2002 et 2007 de plus on montre qu alors que la productivite plus faible des petits etablissements au canada par rapport aux etats unis explique le gros de l ecart pour une annee particuliere c est la deterioration de la productivite des grands etablissements au canada qui explique le gros de la croissance de l ecart au cours de cette periode

controlling for the use of extreme weights in bank efficiency assessments during the financial crisis we propose a method for bank efficiency assessment based on weight restricted dea that limits banks abilities to use extreme weights corresponding to extreme judgements of the risk adjusted prices on funding sources and assets based on a data set comprising the largest european banks during the financial crisis we illustrate the impact of the proposed weight restrictions in two different efficiency models one related to banks funding mix and one related to their asset mix the results show that using a more balanced set of weights tend to reduce the estimated efficiency scores more for those banks which were bailed out during the crisis which confirms the potential bias within standard dea that does not control for extreme weights applied by highly risky banks we discuss the use of the proposed method as a regulatory tool to constrain discretion when complying with regulatory capital benchmarks such as the basel regulatory capital ratios

dual pareto efficiency abstract consider an economy with d commodities and n individuals a pair p m where p is a price vector and m m1 m2 mn is a set of n individual income levels defines a set of individual budget constraints it is known that such pairs provide a framework for duality based investigations of pareto efficient allocations and of equilibria this paper employs this framework in a general setting not requiring smoothness or boundedness of budget sets to develop duals of the first and second theorems of welfare economics namely under suitable assumptions 1 the price income pair associated with any equilibrium is dual pareto efficient and 2 corresponding to any dual pareto efficient pair there is an allocation which together with the given prices forms an equilibrium journal of economic literature classification number s d00 d50 d51 d6l

industry performance and structural efficiency measures solutions to problems in firm models abstract it is shown that average unit structural efficiency measures do not measure the level of technical efficiency in a firm model of an industry alternative structural efficiency measures generalized to multiple input and multiple output technologies are presented as a solution to the problem of how to estimate the relative performance of an industry as a whole where reallocation of inputs across firms is not feasible compared to existing measures the proposed measures require additional information therefore the linear programming dea models needed to obtain this information are presented this non parametric approach to relative efficiency measurement is also used to obtain economic efficiency estimates for an industry as a whole without imposing a priori restrictions on the relative input and output weights

average cost efficiency and optimal scale sizes in non parametric analysis under fairly general assumptions requiring neither a differentiable frontier nor a constant returns to scale technology this paper introduces a new definition of an optimal scale size based on the minimization of unit costs the corresponding measure average cost efficiency combines scale and allocative efficiency and generalizes the measurement of scale economies in efficiency analysis while providing a performance criterion which is stricter than both cost efficiency and scale efficiency measurement the average cost efficiency is not reliant upon the uniformity of the firms input price vector and we supply procedures to compute it in both convex and non convex production technologies empirical illustration of the theoretical results is given with reference to large sets of production units

aggregation of malmquist productivity indexes allowing for reallocation of resources in this paper we consider aggregate malmquist productivity index measures which allow inputs to be reallocated within the group when in output orientation this merges the single period aggregation results allowing input reallocation of nesterenko and zelenyuk 2007 with the aggregate malmquist productivity index results of zelenyuk 2006 to determine aggregate malmquist productivity indexes that are justified by economic theory consistent with previous aggregation results and which maintain analogous decompositions to the original measures such measures are of direct relevance to firms or countries who have merged making input reallocation possible allowing them to measure potential productivity gains and how these have been realised or not over time

measuring efficiency with a linear economic model this paper modifies and interprets data envelopment analysis dea using a linear economic model this approach is similar to the cone input output and assurance region approaches to dea but it is implemented so that the multipliers are measured in the same units across all linear optimization problems this approach allows one to interpret alternatives as profit maximizing organizations and the dea multipliers as prices that are comparable across the alternatives this is a useful extension of the assurance region concept but more important is that our approach enhances communication with decision makers the improved communication is illustrated by applying the model to the siting of a long term health care facility this application is interesting because the multiplier bounds make practical sense and because the problem has dimensions that sometimes lead to interpretation problems with the traditional dea model for example the site characteristics do not result from coordinated decisions some s

measuring and decomposing firm s revenue and cost efficiency the russell measures revisited abstract overall inefficiency measurement and decomposition are important for firms facing a world of changing prices since the resultant loss has implications on managers decision making in this paper we draw attention to some problems within existing approaches to decompose overall inefficiency into its sources and propose new revenue and cost inefficiency measures based on the well known russell measures specifically the technical inefficiency component is calculated by the russell output input measure which is able to incorporate all sources of inefficiency corresponding to the output input side specifically output input slacks whereas allocative inefficiency is retrieved residually all our results are derived from a new fenchel mahler inequality using the theory of convex conjugates this paper has several implications in theory and practice from a theoretical point of view we establish a natural dual relationship between the revenue cost function and the russell output input measure despite the previous unsuccessful attempts in the literature to provide such duality result from a practical point of view we provide a way of decomposing revenue cost inefficiency into allocative inefficiency and a component that measures technical inefficiency in the sense of pareto contrasting with the usual approaches for decomposing revenue cost inefficiency such as those based on shephard s output input distance function and the directional output input distance function

nonparametric analysis of technical and allocative efficiencies in production in this paper we extend varian s 1984 nonparametric production analysis to situations when the set of observed output input and price data is not consistent with profit maximization for at least one firm in such cases varian s results imply that no production possibility set containing all observations can rationalize the observed data we identify each firm whose performance given the prices faced by it may be found consistent with profit maximization relative to some production possibility set containing all observed output input vectors we show that the set 4 of all such firms can itself be weaklv rationalized in the sense that there exists a closed convex and monotone production possibility set that contains all the observations and relative to which the performance of all the firms in the set 8o is consistent with profit maximization given their respective prices by definition firms not included in this largest set d of efficient observations unambiguously deviate from profit maximizing behavior for any production possibility set containing all observations we follow farrell 1957 and analyze these deviations into technical and allocative efficiency measures considering as admissible all closed convex and monotone production possibility sets relative to which the performance of each firm in the set g remains consistent with profit maximization we then describe nonparametric methods for determining the tightest upper and lower bounds on the technical allocative and aggregate efficiency measures evaluated relative to all such admissible production possibility sets it is seen that the tightest upper bound on the technical efficiency measure is the same as the value computed by the nonparametric efficiency evaluation technique known as data envelopment analysis thus establishing a link between this literature in management science operations research and the nonparametric production analysis in economics

the law of one price in data envelopment analysis restricting weight flexibility across firms abstract the law of one price loop states that all firms face the same prices for their inputs and outputs under market equilibrium taken here as a normative condition for efficiency prices this law has powerful implications for productive efficiency analysis which have remained unexploited thus far this paper shows how loop based weight restrictions can be incorporated in data envelopment analysis dea utilizing the relation between industry level and firm level cost efficiency measures we propose to apply a set of input prices that is common for all firms and that maximizes the cost efficiency of the industry our framework allows for firm specific output weights and for variable returns to scale and preserves the linear programming structure of the standard dea we apply the proposed methodology to the evaluation of the research efficiency of economics departments of dutch universities this application shows that the methodology is computationally tractable for practical efficiency analysis and that it helps in deepening the dea analysis

a measure of price advantage and its decomposition into output and input specific effects abstract in this paper we develop a price advantage measure obtained as the difference between efficiency scores computed with quantity based and value based data this measure is interpreted as an increase in the firm s profit rate due to a favourable input and output price environment compared to traditional allocative efficiency measure which uses only the evaluated firm s prices price advantage measure considers prices of peers in the market our main contribution is to show that total price advantage decomposes into the sum of output and input specific price advantages the application of the measure to a french farm s dataset in the context of the successive common agricultural policy reforms aiming at the liberalization of agricultural prices 1992 2013 illustrates our theoretical model

firm and industry level profit efficiency analysis using absolute and uniform shadow prices we discuss the nonparametric approach to profit efficiency analysis at the firm and industry levels in the absence of complete price information two new insights are developed first we measure profit inefficiency in monetary terms using absolute shadow prices second we evaluate all firms using the same input output prices this allows us to aggregate firm level profit inefficiencies to the overall industry inefficiency besides the measurement of profit losses the presented approach enables one to recover absolute price information from quantity data we conduct a series of monte carlo simulations to study the performance of the proposed approach in controlled production environments

a note on input congestion abstract the notion of effective space is introduced and input congestion is explained by economic activities exhaustion of effective space in this setting i show that profit maximization is inconsistent with input congestion at the firm level but not necessarily with input congestion at the industry level when effective space is shared among producers

a generalized dea model for centralized resource allocation abstract in this paper we introduced a new generalized centralized resource allocation model which extends lozano and villa s and asmild et al s models to a more general case in order to uncover the sources of such total input contraction in the generalized centralized resource allocation model we applied the structural efficiency to further decompose it into three components the aggregate technical efficiency the aggregate allocative efficiency and re transferable efficiency components the proposed models are not only flexible enough for the central decision maker to adjust the inputs and outputs to achieve the total input contraction but also identify the sources of such total input contraction thereby giving rise to an important interpretation and understanding of the generalized centralized resource allocation model finally an empirical example is used to illustrate the approach

information aggregation inflation and the pricing of indexed bonds using daily prices of indexed bonds between 1970 and 1979 we test whether announcements of the israeli cpi contain information that is not already reflected in bond prices the results indicate that bond prices reflect about 85 percent of the new information about inflation as it occurs i e when the central bureau of statistics samples prices the announcement of the cpi 15 days after the end of the sampling period causes the remaining 15 percent adjustment in bond prices this evidence raises questions about the empirical importance of misperceptions about inflation as a source of nonneutrality in monetary policy

the real thing a dynamic profile of the term structure of real interest rates and inflation expectations in the united kingdom 1982 89 this article estimates real interest rates and inflation expectations from market observable data without assuming anything about the form of agents expectation formation mechanism by examining prices of index linked and conventional gilt edged securities form the u k bond market real interest rates and inflation expectations are computed quarterly beginning 1982 2 for up to fourteen maturities ranging from 1988 to 2024 copyright 1990 by the university of chicago

an overall measure of technical inefficiency at the firm and at the industry level the lost profit on outlay abstract as a measure of overall technical inefficiency the directional distance function ddf introduced by chambers chung and fare ties the potential output expansion and input contraction together through a single parameter by duality the ddf is related to a measure of profit inefficiency which is calculated as the normalized deviation between optimal and actual profit at market prices as we show in the most usual case the associated normalization represents the sum of the actual revenue and the actual cost of the assessed firm consequently the corresponding profit inefficiency measure associated with the ddf has no obvious economic interpretation in contrast in this paper we allow outputs to expand and inputs to contract by different proportions this results in a modified ddf that retains most of the properties of the original ddf the corresponding dual problem has a much simpler interpretation as the lost profit on average outlay that can be decomposed into a technical and an allocative inefficiency component in addition an overall measure of technical inefficiency at the industry level is introduced resorting to the direction corresponding to the average input output bundle

on price efficiency in many instances a firm s observed production choices will not be consistent with profit maximization or cost minimization at market prices such firms are generally assumed to minimize cost with respect to shadow prices the authors extend this shadow cost function approach to allow for the identification of firm specific shadow prices using a piecewise linear representation of the reference technology they specify a linear program and interpret its solution as a set of shadow prices the authors derive farrell like measures of dual allocative technical and overall efficiency they close with an example illustrating the use of this technique copyright 1990 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

cost efficiency in data envelopment analysis under the law of one price abstract to impose the law of one price loop restrictions which state that all firms face the same input prices kuosmanen cherchye and sipilainen 2006 developed the top down and bottom up approaches to maximizing the industry level cost efficiency however the optimal input shadow prices generated by the above approaches need not be unique which influences the distribution of the efficiency indices at the individual firm level to solve this problem in this paper we developed a pair of two level mathematical programming models to calculate the upper and lower bounds of cost efficiency for each firm in the case of non unique loop prices while keeping the industry cost efficiency optimal furthermore a base enumerating algorithm is proposed to solve the lower bound models of the cost efficiency measure which are bi level linear programs and np hard problems lastly a numerical example is used to demonstrate the proposed approach

the effect of risk based capital requirements on profit efficiency in banking the purpose of this paper is twofold to show how to measure profit efficiency in banking using a newly developed technique and to use that technique to determine the effect of risk based capital requirements on the profit performance of us banks the measure of profit efficiency used captures deviations from profit maximization arising from technical inefficiency caused by a lack of managerial oversight and allocative inefficiency which is caused by managers choosing a nonoptimal mix of inputs and outputs a leverage ratio constraint and a risk weighted capital ratio constraint are explicitly included in the model which allows identification of the effect on profits of those constraints the techniques are applied to random samples of us banks for 1990 1992 and 1994 the results indicate that allocative inefficiency is a larger source of profit loss than technical inefficiency and that the risk based capital standards have a significant effect on bank allocative efficiency

decomposing profit inefficiency in dea through the weighted additive model abstract an issue that has received little attention in the data envelopment analysis literature is the decomposition of profit inefficiency by means of measures that account all sources of technical inefficiency in this paper we introduce a new way to measure and decompose profit inefficiency through weighted additive models all our results are derived from a new fenchel mahler inequality using duality theory

solving the puzzles of structural efficiency abstract since the concept of structural efficiency first appeared in farrell farrell m j 1957 the measurement of productive efficiency journal of the royal statistical society series a part iii 120 253 281 attempts have been made to derive measures for the performance of a group of production units often referred to an industry with many firms many empirical studies used the technical efficiency of an average unit to measure the structural efficiency of a group but researchers have been puzzled by the discrepancies between the average of individual efficiency scores and the performance of the group as a whole in this paper we point out that the shadow price model provides a useful framework for understanding the economic meaning of the structural efficiency as well as its components by recognizing these components the puzzles related to the inconsistencies between the individual and group performance can be solved readily

valuing environmental factors in cost benefit analysis using data envelopment analysis abstract environmental cost benefit analysis ecba is used for the social evaluation of investment projects and policies that involve significant environmental impacts economic valuation of environmental impacts forms one of the critical steps of ecba we develop a new method for this purpose which does not require price estimation for environmental impacts using stated or revealed preference methods our approach is based on data envelopment analysis dea which is modified to ecba by using absolute shadow prices instead of relative prices we also discuss how the method can be used for sensitive analysis in ecba we illustrate the method by means of a hypothetical numerical example

a technically level playing field profit efficiency analysis of enforced competition between publicly funded institutions abstract the study demonstrates how recent advances in the data envelopment analysis dea of profit efficiency and in combining dea and stochastic frontier analysis sfa to measure producer performance can be used to obtain a technically level playing field profit efficiency performance measure a three stage analysis is used to provide an empirical investigation of public sector universities facing regulatory pressures to attain both profit efficiency and output quality stage one employs directional distance function analysis to decompose dea profit efficiency measures into technical and allocative components as these performance measures incorporate the impacts of managerial inefficiency the operating environment and luck statistical noise stage two applies sfa to total radial and non radial slacks to obtain a degree of disentanglement from the latter two impacts the stage two results are used to define a common environment and common luck scenario thus permitting university producers inputs to be adjusted so as to reflect operation within this more level playing field scenario stage three recomputes the first stage dea for this scenario to yield an input focused technically level playing field measure of profit efficiency that unifies the regulatory financial audit and output quality indicators in a single best practice benchmarked performance measure

accounting for slacks to measure and decompose revenue efficiency in the spanish designation of origin wines with dea abstract in this paper we show how data envelopment analysis dea may be used to measure and decompose revenue inefficiency taking into account all sources of technical waste in the context of an application to assess the spanish quality wine sector in particular designation of origin do wines we try to go beyond the standard approaches which use shephard distance functions or directional distance functions to provide decomposition that incorporates slacks as a source of technical inefficiency to accomplish this we will base our analysis on a recent approach introduced in cooper et al 2011a in particular we show how an output oriented version of the weighted additive model can be used to properly identify revenue technical and allocative inefficiencies in spanish dos in the application we conclude that the main source of revenue inefficiency in this sector is technical waste and that cava can be highlighted as the do that performs as a benchmark for more numbers of units