measuring returns to scale in dea models when the firm is regulated in the standard framework of data envelopment analysis dea models the returns to scale are fully characterized using the multiplier on the convexity constraint of inefficient decision making units dmu using the projection of the input output vector on the frontier in this note we investigate how the returns to scale measurements in dea models are affected by the presence of regulatory constraints these additional constraints change the role played by the convexity constraint in order to avoid biased estimation of the returns to scale we show that the interaction between the regulatory and the convexity constraints has to be taken into account

welfare and trade effects of international environmental agreements we analyse the welfare effects of environmental policy arising from the formation of an international environmental agreement on the participating and non participating countries and thus shed light on the potential incentives for a country to join such an agreement within a n country q goods general equilibrium framework under free trade conditions we consider unilateral and cooperative policy settings and within the latter country specific and fully harmonized policies within the agreement a key result of the paper is the emergence of a negative relationship arising from terms of trade effects between the welfare changes of the participating and non participating countries following the formation of the agreement these however do not result in a zero sum welfare outcome for the world as a whole

some reflections on insurance pricing we analyse three aspects of the recent evolution of french automobile insurance by use of three simple theoretical models the fantastic development of professional mutuals the growing complexity of tariffs the increasing recourse to product differentiation each of these aspects can be interpreted as a step further in the direction of increasing premiums personalization the question we examine is how far should we go

nonparametric measures of scale economies and capacity utilization an application to u s manufacturing abstract an economic measure of scale efficiency is the ratio of the minimum average cost to the average cost at the actual output level of a firm it is easily measured by the ratio of the total cost of this output under the constant and variable returns to scale assumptions this procedure does not identify the output level where the average cost reaches a minimum this paper proposes a nonparametric method of measuring this output level using dea the relation between this efficient production scale the short run physical capacity output and the most productive scale size mpss is also discussed an empirical application using state level data from u s manufacturing is used to illustrate the procedure the dea findings are further analyzed using a smoothed bootstrap procedure

marginal commodity tax reforms a survey as noted 30 years ago by martin feldstein optimal taxes may be useless for practical purposes and emphasis should instead be placed on the possibility of enhancing welfare by reforming existing tax rates in this perspective marginal commodity tax reforms are gaining increasing attention due to political and economic constraints on large reforms of direct or indirect taxation in this paper we summarize the main features and results of the literature on marginal commodity tax reforms pioneered by ahmad and stern further developed by yitzhaki and thirsk and recently reinterpreted by makdissi and wodon we establish new links to other fields of research namely the literature on the use of equivalence scales and on poverty measurement we also critically examine some issues associated with the implementation of marginal tax reforms with special reference to the calculation of welfare weights and revenue effects finally we suggest directions for future research on poverty reducing commodity tax reforms

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

measures to enhance the effectiveness of international climate agreements the case of border carbon adjustments abstract actions on climate change which are not supported by all countries are not very effective however full participation in a global climate treaty with meaningful emission reductions is difficult to achieve the non excludability of the public good mitigation provides an incentive to abstain from global action moreover carbon leakage renders it unattractive to join a treaty without full participation we study whether and under which conditions border carbon adjustments bcas can mitigate free riding and reduce carbon leakage in a simple strategic trade model we show that bcas can lead to large stable climate agreements including full participation associated with large global welfare gains if treaties do not restrict membership open membership as this is typical for environmental agreements we caution against restricting accession to treaties exclusive membership as this is typical for trade agreements which may serve individual but not global interests

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

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency in their comment subhash c ray and evangelia desli 1997 hereafter rd point out that the specification of the decomposition of the malmquist productivity index used by fare et al 1994 hereafter fgnz is not unique and propose and compute an alternative specification of that decomposition we will discuss additional decompositions at the end of this note but proceed here by comparing the rd decomposition with fgnz based on both conceptual and computational grounds rd provide a discussion of the overall malmquist productivity index including the important issue of when this index is equivalent to the traditional notion of total factor productivity tfp namely under the condition that the reference technology be consistent with constant returns to scale crs as they point out this will yield a measure of tfp even if the true underlying technology is not crs for example both rd and fgnz use the crs reference technology to compute overall malmquist productivity one of the key issues raised is the role of the underlying scale properties of the benchmark technologies used to define and compute both productivity and its components in particular two reference technologies are employed in both rd and fgnz what we refer to as crs and variable returns to scale vrs technologies by construction these technologies are nested the crs technology contains the vrs technology as in figure 1 in rd this nestedness provides the logical basis for our decomposition at a very intuitive level we would argue that these two benchmarks can be used to provide bounds on the underlying true but unknown technology 2 intuitively we see the vrs technology providing a type of convex inner approximation whereas the crs technology provides a type of convex outer approximation thus these two technologies provide alternative benchmarks they do not require that the data satisfy either crs or vrs another possible intuitive interpretation is that the crs captures a perhaps hypothetical long run and the vrs approximates the short run as a reference technology the crs technology has some very useful features for example it captures the notion of maximal

further discussion on linear production functions and dea abstract the purpose of the current paper is to clarify the misunderstanding in using the constant returns to scale crs model in data envelopment analysis dea to estimate returns to scale rts classification by illustrating the following two different assumptions a all decision making units dmus are assumed to be compared to a crs frontier in the ccr model i e all dmus are assumed to be capable of operating under crs and b all dmus exhibit crs several incorrect points about rts estimation raised by chang k p and guh y y 1991 european journal of operational research 52 215 223 and chang k p 1997 european journal of operational research 97 597 599 are examined it is shown that the assumption a does not mean that the rts classification cannot be estimated the crs frontier assumption cannot change the rts nature of each dmu since the ccr model mixes a technical efficiency and a scale efficiency it is possible and meaningful to use the ccr results to determine the rts classification finally the infeasibility of chang and guh s 1991 treatment of non archimedean infinitesimal is discussed

environmental taxation tax competition and harmonization abstract this paper studies the tax competition problem in the presence of transboundary pollution it shows that economic integration causes the firms to adopt the same or less polluting technologies but it nevertheless increases aggregate emissions and lowers welfare second the paper examines the ramifications of partial tax harmonization policies it shows that harmonizing commodity taxes above their unrestricted nash equilibrium value may either increase or lower the equilibrium emission tax under the former firms opt for less polluting technologies aggregate emissions decrease and welfare improves on the other hand if emission tax goes down firms will choose more polluting technologies aggregate emissions will increase and welfare deteriorates finally harmonizing the emission tax above its unrestricted nash equilibrium value which leads the firms to adopt a less polluting technology also causes aggregate emissions to decline and overall welfare to increase

the efficiency of competitive equilibria in insurance markets with asymmetric information abstract this paper addresses the relationship between competitive equilibria and efficient allocations in an insurance market with asymmetric information using the definition of second best efficiency proposed by harris and townsend 1981 for environments characterized by informational assmmetry the efficiency properties of several proposed market equilibria are examined we find an analogue to the first optimality theorem a miyazaki wilson equilibrium always results in a second best allocation

border adjustments supplementing nationally determined carbon pricing as agreed on in the paris agreement each country determines its own contribution to combat climate change on a voluntary basis there is no mechanism to force a country to comply with its own nationally determined contributions this bottom up approach builds on unilateral actions and yields a kind of carbon pricing which is not necessarily identical across countries as a consequence these nationally determined climate policies have drawbacks in terms of carbon leakage and loss of competitiveness for firms producing in high carbon price countries to reduce these negative effects border adjustments bas may be appropriate subsequent to more stringent environmental regulation we model a three stage game involving carbon price competition in the first stage the introduction of bas in the second stage and oligopolistic competition between firms in the third stage strategic trade theory suggests that the qualitative results about the optimal ba policy may vary with the underlying type of competition namely bertrand and cournot competition however our results are similar for both types of competition we conclude that bas are suitable for supporting a more stringent environmental policy moreover we find that anticipation of the implementation of bas in the second stage yields higher average carbon prices in the first stage since high carbon price countries increase their carbon prices whereas the other countries partially offset

marginal values and returns to scale for nonparametric production frontiers we present a unifying linear programming approach to the calculation of various directional derivatives for a very large class of production frontiers of data envelopment analysis dea special cases of this include different marginal rates the scale elasticity and a spectrum of partial and mixed elasticity measures our development applies to any polyhedral production technology including to name a few the conventional variable and constant returns to scale dea technologies their extensions with weight restrictions technologies with weakly disposable undesirable outputs and network dea models furthermore our development provides a general method for characterization of returns to scale rts in any polyhedral technology the new approach effectively removes the need to develop bespoke models for the rts characterization and calculation of marginal rates and elasticity measures for each particular technology

coordinating climate and trade policies pareto efficiency and the role of border tax adjustments abstract this paper explores the role of trade instruments in globally efficient climate policies focusing on whether or not some form of border tax adjustment bta is warranted when carbon prices differ internationally the analysis shows that while there is no case for bta when all instruments can be freely deployed pareto efficiency does require a form of bta when carbon taxes in some countries are constrained its purpose then is to partly counteract the impact on emissions of inappropriate carbon pricing there or equivalently to undo the trade distortions such pricing creates the required form of bta is generally complex but a special case is identified in which it optimally has the simple structure envisaged in practical policy discussions it is also shown that the efficiency case for bta depends critically on whether climate policies are pursued by carbon taxation or by cap and trade

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

is chinese trade policy motivated by environmental concerns abstract this paper analyses whether china s export vat rebates and export taxes are driven by environmental concerns since china struggles to enforce environmental regulation trade policy can be used as a second best environmental policy in a general equilibrium model it is possible to show that the second best export tax increases in a product s pollution intensity the empirical analysis investigates whether the export tax equivalent of partial vat rebates and export taxes are higher for products which are more pollution intensive along several dimensions the results indicate that the vat rebate rates are set in a way that discourages exports of water pollution intensive so 2 intensive and energy intensive products from 2007 on moreover the conservation of natural resources such as minerals metals wood products and precious stones seems to be a key determinant of china s export vat rebate rates there is little evidence that export taxes are motivated by environmental concerns

international trade and the environment policy reform in a polluted small open economy abstract this paper investigates sufficient conditions for welfare improving policy reforms in a small open economy facing many trade and pollution distortions we investigate and compare reform in tax regimes quota regimes and mixed regimes where some pollutants are regulated with taxes and others with quotas it is also shown that the welfare benefits of reforming pollution policy are greater in an economy with international factor mobility than in an economy not subject to such mobility

measuring overall efficiency and effectiveness using dea this paper presents a framework where data envelopment analysis dea is used to measure overall efficiency and show how to apply this framework to assess effectiveness for more general behavioral goals the relationships between various cone ratio dea models and models to measure overall efficiency are clarified specifically it is shown that as multiplier cones tighten the cone ratio dea models converge to measures of overall efficiency furthermore it is argued that multiplier cone and cone ratio model selection must be consistent with the behavioral goals assigned or assumed for purposes of analysis consistent with this reasoning two new models are introduced to measure effectiveness when value measures are represented by separable or linked cones where the latter can be used to analyze profit maximizing effectiveness

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

energy and ghg emission efficiency in the chilean manufacturing industry sectoral and regional analysis by dea and malmquist indexes abstract global warming produced mainly by the emission of greenhouse gases is currently a worldwide concern in the last few decades since the 1950s many of the changes observed in the world climate have been meaningful this paper presents an analysis of energy efficiency and of greenhouse gas emissions in the chilean manufacturing industry by region and sector taking into consideration time sequences data envelopment analysis dea models are used for the analysis three ways to handle undesirable outputs are compared the source of inefficiency in each decision making unit dmu is calculated using scale efficiency and the evolution over time is analyzed using the malmquist index the results indicate that the industries located in the chilean regions of coquimbo la araucania and aysen were the most efficient while the industries in the regions of tarapaca antofagasta and biobio were less efficient the most efficient industrial sectors were those involving communications equipment base metals and clothing the least efficient were those concerned with food and beverages textiles and nonmetallic minerals due to the treatment of the undesirable outputs differences were found in the efficiency indexes obtained by the three models this finding suggests using a model better adapted to the characteristics of the outputs in question and the viability of improving industrial practices

linked cone dea profit ratios and technical efficiency with application to illinois coal mines data envelopment analysis dea profit ratios and technical efficiency measures require separate treatment as proved in newly developed theory of thompson and thrall this point is illustrated here by analysis of an example problem it shows that dea technical efficiency does not necessarily imply a dea maximum profit ratio and vice versa a dea maximum profit ratio does not necessarily imply dea technical efficiency the essence of the mathematical framework underlying this argument is provided application of the concepts to illinois coal mining data previously reported lends support to the need for separate treatment of dea technical efficiency and dea profit ratios

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

data envelopment analysis on a relaxed set of assumptions data envelopment analysis is a procedure for evaluation of the relative efficiency of units in a production system dea involves construction of composite units as convex combinations of other units inputs and outputs under various conditions related to returns to scale the assumption of convexity is inconsistent with increasing returns to scale and not implied by constant or non increasing returns to scale an alternative dea approach which does not invoke the assumption of a convex production possibility set is developed in this paper it is implemented in two stages stage one is concerned with the spanning of isoquants and stage two with an evaluation of the position of an observed input output combination compared to the isoquants both stages involve linear programming techniques solely

public good provision and the welfare effects of indirect tax harmonisation the paper considers the welfare effect of the harmonisation of indirect taxes in two open economies the revenue from taxation is used for the production of a non tradeable public good the welfare levels are affected via two channels i changes in the levels of public good provision and ii changes in deadweight loss associated with the taxes we develop a number of rules of harmonisation and derive conditions under which they lead to potential pareto improvement

on alternative optimal solutions in the estimation of returns to scale in dea zhu and shen european journal of operational research 81 1995 590 show that alternative optimal solutions in the estimation of returns to scale rts are caused by a particular linear dependency among a set of extreme efficient dmus when one employs the concept of most productive scale size european journal of operational research 17 1984 35 in data envelopment analysis dea this paper demonstrates that the presence of weakly efficient dmus may also lead to alternative optima and extends the results of zhu and shen to the entire frontier necessary and sufficient conditions for the presence of multiple optimal solutions for constant returns to scale crs dmus are established

the welfare consequences of pollution tax harmonization a key and often controversial issue in environmental negotiations is the appropriate extent of harmonization of environmental policies this paper within a general equilibrium model of international trade with endogenous pollution discharges identifies instances in which pollution tax harmonization can deliver potential pareto improvements

categorizing risks in the insurance industry this paper analyzes the welfare implications of imperfectly categorizing risks in the insurance industry under conditions of asymmetric information firms initially unable to distinguish the risk type of individuals are provided with imperfect information concerning risk membership the paper then compares various wilson type equilibria to determine the welfare implications of firms imperfectly categorizing risks it is shown that only in the case where the initial equilibrium is of the nash no subsidy type is there a pareto type improvement in welfare

measurement of multiperiod aggregative efficiency abstract this article proposes a new method for measuring an aggregative efficiency of multiple period production systems every organization or firm generates a time series of data that represent its performances in the resource utilization and output production over multiple periods and often desires an aggregated measure of efficiency for several periods of interest data envelopment analysis dea has become an accepted and well known approach to evaluating efficiency performance in a wide range of cases however most of the dea studies have dealt primarily with ways to gauge the efficiency of production in only a single period so this efficiency reflects the insufficient or partial performance of multiple period productions the new method is developed through extensions of the concept of debreu farrell technical efficiency and is applied to evaluating the efficiency of cable tv service units with 3 year data

a scale elasticity measure for directional distance function and its dual theory and dea estimation abstract in this paper we focus on scale elasticity measure based on directional distance function for multi output multi input technologies explore its fundamental properties and show its equivalence with the input oriented and output oriented scale elasticity measures we also establish duality relationship between the scale elasticity measure based on the directional distance function with scale elasticity measure based on the profit function finally we discuss the estimation issues of the scale elasticity based on the directional distance function via the dea estimator

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

asymmetric tax policy responses in large economies with cross border pollution we build a model of cross border pollution between two large open economies one importing the polluting good and the other exporting it and derive their non cooperative trade and environmental tax policies we show among other things that 1 in response to a bilateral reduction in trade taxes by both countries the former country s optimal policy is to lower its nash emissions tax while the latter s is to raise it and 2 in response to an increase in emissions tax rates by both countries the former country s optimal reaction is to raise its nash import tariff while the latter s is to reduce its nash export tax that is in the present context freer trade leads the exporting country to adopt stricter while the importing country laxer environmental tax policies

measuring and explaining scale efficiency with the parametric approach the case of greek tobacco growers estimates of technical and scale inefficiencies of tobacco farms in greece during the period 1991 1995 are obtained by using the parametric approach the degree of technical efficiency was found to be lower than the degree of scale efficiency and thus a greater portion of overall inefficiency is due to producing below the production frontier than to producing at an inefficient scale in addition the vast majority of farms in the sample exhibited suboptimal scale implying that output should be expanded to reach the optimal scale empirical results are provided to determine the impact of various socioeconomic demographic and geoclimatic indicators on technical and scale efficiency

cross border pollution terms of trade and welfare we construct a two good general equilibrium model of international trade for two small open economies where pollution from production is transmitted across borders governments in both countries impose emission taxes non cooperatively within this framework we examine the effect of changes in the degree of cross border pollution on nash emission taxes emission levels and welfare we do so under two scenarios when changes in cross border pollution do not affect domestic pollution non strategic and when they do strategic we also examine the effect of changes in international terms of trade on pollution and welfare when cross border pollution is non strategic

dea ar profit ratios and sensitivity of 100 large u s banks abstract several important dea ar concepts were applied here to banking for the first time this application includes classification sensitivity uniqueness linked cones lcs and profit ratios notably large bank behavior seems to be explained better by profit ratios than by relative efficiency measures of dea efficiency ar efficiency and lc profit ratios were made for a bank panel of the u s s 100 largest banks in asset size from 1986 to 1991 high levels of inefficiency were found as in previous studies classification of the dea efficiency measures identified the inefficient dmus with some positive primal slacks sensitivity analysis of the dea efficiency measures showed that the extreme efficient classification was generally relatively insensitive to errors in the data the ars eliminated i 44 to 60 of the dea extreme efficient dmus and ii all of the banks with unprofitable actual profit ratios some statistical analyses highlight the superiority of the lc profit ratios relative to the ar efficiency measures

climate and international trade policies when emissions affect production possibilities abstract in this paper we develop a model of international trade and climate change in which emission discharges arising from production have a feedback effect on national production sectors by impacting upon effective factor endowments with this context the objectives are first to provide a general characterization of pareto efficient climate and trade policies and second to examine the possibility starting from non pareto efficient equilibria for pareto improving environmental policies we provide conditions under which several particular reforms of carbon taxes are welfare improving

using dea to evaluate 29 canadian textile companies considering returns to scale in this research we use data envelopment analysis dea to evaluate the performance of 29 canadian textile companies in 1994 using the charnes cooper and rodes ccr model in dea we first obtain the results of efficiency scores and returns to scale of 29 canadian textile companies we then focus on the returns to scale to examine the possibility of utilizing the inefficient inputs by either further expansion or vertical integration we develop a mathematical model to consider the trade off between reducing and not reducing the input surplus we use the cone ratio model to find the optimal level of vertical utilization the computational results are based on real data from the canadian textile companies

the origin principle tax harmonization and public goods abstract this paper takes up two tasks firstly it shows that the conclusion drawn in lucas 2001 lucas v 2001 tax harmonisation and the origin principle economic letters 71 111 115 regarding potential pareto improvement in small open economies needs to be amended secondly in large open economies it verifies that some reasonable conjectures concerning the welfare effects of a particular tax harmonizing reform hold under the origin based tax system when public goods are present

returns to scale and most productive scale size in dea with negative data abstract non parametric evaluation of returns to scale of production units in standard dea models becomes problematic when their underlying technologies involve negative data the methodology recently offered by allahyar and rostamy malkhalifeh 2015 hence after called arm model is of some help to deal with this issue however there are two shortcomings underlying the arm model first it may not be capable of locating all the production units exhibiting constant returns to scale and second it is also not able to determine most productive scale size in order to deal with these two shortcomings the current paper contributes to the dea literature in two ways first it makes a unifying attempt to propose a general non radial dea model to determine both the most productive scale size and the returns to scale characterizations of production units in the presence of negative data second the proposed model can be adapted in a dynamic dea technology setting to determine growth efficiency and returns to growth behavior of production units facing hyper competition in a new economy

the efficiency effects of categorical discrimination in the insurance industry recent public policy debate has focused concern on the equity dimensions of categorical discrimination based on sex age or race in insurance and similar markets we consider the efficiency effects of such discrimination and establish that costless imperfect categorization always enhances efficiency when categorization entails a nonnegligible resource cost however no unambiguous efficiency ranking of informational regimes is possible when categorization is costless we demonstrate that government having no better information than market participants can effect redistribution without assuming dictatorial control of the market implying that a market equilibrium with costless categorization is potentially pareto superior to one without it when categorization is costly however the market may categorize when pareto improvements are not possible

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

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

a goal programming constrained regression review of the bell system breakup the recently implemented court decision to break up bell american telephone telegraph co to accord with u s anti trust laws represents a highly significant policy decision which is proving to be influential in other countries as well as the u s the telecommunication industry is of such size and importance that even relatively small economies that might be lost with bell s breakup as a natural monopoly could involve substantial welfare losses to consumers and producers studies commissioned by the u s justice department that approached this topic by econometric methods reported that the evidence failed to support the contention that bell was a natural monopoly here a goal programming constrained regression as developed in the management science literature uses the same functional form and the same data but nevertheless reverses the main findings of the econometric studies in every one of the 20 years covered this kind of difference in results obtained by two different methods of analysis poi

welfare effects of commodity tax harmonisation abstract the european commission is currently seeking a rapid accelaration of the process of commodity tax harmonisation within the european community substantial changes in domestic tax structures are envisaged yet the welfare theoretic basis of the policy has remained obscure this note goes some way towards suggesting a welfare argument for harmonisation as a collective response to tax induced trade distortions intentional or otherwise it is shown that a programme of multilateral domestic tax reform involving convergence towards an appropriately weighted average of pre existing tax structures a kind of harmonisation is potentially pareto improving

commodity tax harmonisation and public goods this paper examines the welfare effects of commodity tax harmonisation incorporating in the analysis the important feature that tax revenue is not returned to the consumer as a lump sum but it is used to finance a local public good only under certain conditions commodity tax harmonisation is potentially welfare improving introducing both transfers between consumers and transfers between governments it is shown inter alia that the analysis is sensitive to the kind of transfers assumed suggesting that arguments that rely on international transfers should be handled with care

the impact of imperfectly categorizing risks on income inequality and social welfare the use of imperfect information to categorize risks is a pervasive and controversial phenomenon in the insurance industry although this activity reduces the average extent of vertical price discrimination it is shown in this paper that both highand low risk types may prefer ex ante to knowing the category to which they will be assigned that such information be suppressed furthermore for the lorenz criterion it is shown that under certain restrictive demand conditions the imperfect categorization of risks leads to an increase in inequality the paper employs the wilson e2 equilibrium concept l impact d une categorisation imparfaite des risques sur l inegalite du revenu et le bien etre social l utilisation de renseignements imparfaits pour categoriser les risques est un probleme important qui porte a controverses dans l industrie de i assurance meme si ce phenomene reduit le degre de discrimination verticale par les prix en moyenne i auteur montre que a la fois les personnes dont le coefficient de risques est faible et elev6 et ce avant de savoir a quelle categorie on va les assigner peuvent fort bien preferer que cette information soit supprimee de plus 1 auteur montre que sous certaines conditions de demande restrictives la categorisation imparfaite des risques conduit a un accroissement du degre d inegalite mesure par le critere de lorenz ce memoire utilise le concept d equilibre dit de wilson e2 if insurance firms are unable to distinguish between the risk types of their clients but consumers know their own probability of loss i e if asymmetric information persists then the complication of adverse selection may arise adverse selection occurs when the class of risks or set of classes that purchases insurance differs adversely from that anticipated by the firm for example if a firm offers a contract to low risk types at their actuarially fair rate then high risk types will also purchase it with the result that the firm will earn expected losses hence the problem of adverse selection restricts the ability of firms to offer efficient insurance contracts to low risk types it has been demonstrated by rothschild and stiglitz 1976 that provided the proportion of high risk types in the population is above some critical level a this paper is a revised version of chapter 3 of the author s phd thesis entitled the economics of risk classification in insurance london school of economics and political science 1982 i am indebted to my supervisor lucien foldes and an anonymous referee for useful comments the author alone is responsible for any errors herein canadian journal of economics revue canadienne d economique xvil no 3 august aotlt 1984 printed in canada imprimd au canada 0008 4085 84 557 568 1 50 c canadian economics association this content downloaded from 157 55 39 215 on wed 31 aug 2016 04 39 57 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms

the efficiency of conventional fuel power plants in south korea a comparison of parametric and non parametric approaches abstract the efficiencies of the 64 conventional fuel power plants operating in south korea were determined by data envelopment analysis dea approaches as well as by a stochastic frontier method the banker charnes and cooper bcc dea efficiencies were introduced into an econometric estimate of a standard production function model leading to a corrected factors version of the model with significant improvement of the statistical explanation of our data a statistical analysis of the dea efficiencies was carried out and these were compared to efficiencies revealed by a stochastic frontier method