effects of local and civil environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in china a spatial durbin econometric analysis this paper employs metafrontier malmquist luenberger index and a spatial durbin model to investigate the influence of both local and civil environmental regulation and its spatial spillover effect on green total factor productivity in 273 cities of china in 2003 2013 according to city political attribute and regional differences this article divides the sample city into six categories the results show that effect of local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity is significantly positive in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone but negative effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone moreover the race to the top results in significantly positive spatial spillover effects from local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone while the race to the bottom causes significantly negative spatial spillover effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone as for civil environmental regulation it has positive direct and indirect effects in promoting green total factor productivity we further find that environmental regulation inhibits the original technological innovation of enterprises which suggests that government should reduce market intervention improve enterprise flexibility of market change and promote enterprises to carry out the original technological innovation thus the government and citizen should make targeted pollution reduction policies for the green total factor productivity increase

productivity in public services abstract this paper discusses issues arising in the measurement of productivity in public services compared to measuring productivity in the private sector difficulties arise because the output of public services is often unpriced and because some public services are consumed collectively a key problem is measuring the full range of outputs and quality improvements delivered by public sector organizations that are valued by society without comprehensive measures of output productivity statistics may be misleading i outline methods used in the measurement of both private and public sector productivity and discuss the measurement of public sector productivity in practice finally i discuss studies that examine factors underlying productivity differences and productivity growth in public and private sector organizations public sector reforms and the use of pilot schemes in public sector organizations present opportunities for research to identify causal effects on productivity

optimal reserves in financially closed economies abstract financially closed economies insure themselves against current account shocks using international reserves we characterize the optimal management of reserves using an open economy model of precautionary savings and emphasize several results first the welfare based opportunity cost of reserves differs from the measures often used in the literature second under plausible calibrations the model is consistent with the rule of thumb that reserves should be close to three months of imports third optimal linear rules can capture most of the welfare gains from optimal reserve management but significantly differ from certainty equivalence fourth policymakers should place more emphasis on how to use reserves in response to shocks than on the reserve target itself

the economic costs of environmental regulation in u s dairy farming a directional distance function approach analyses of the costs of regulating greenhouse gas emissions from dairy production which could be used to assess the effectiveness of alternative policy measures is a missing link in the literature this article addresses this gap by establishing the economic impact associated with a hypothetical greenhouse gas environmental regulatory regime across major dairy producing counties in the united states in doing so the article makes three important contributions to the literature first it develops a comprehensive pollution index based on environmental protection agency methodologies which contrasts with previous studies that rely on partial measures based only on surplus nitrogen stemming from the over application of fertilizer second the article uses a directional output distance function an approach that has not been employed previously to evaluate polluting technologies in the u s dairy sector third the article incorporates a four way error approach that accounts for unobserved county heterogeneity time invariant persistent technical efficiency time varying transient technical efficiency and a random error the results indicate that regulating greenhouse gas emissions from dairy farming would induce a 5 percentage point increase in average technical efficiency in addition the economic costs of implementing this hypothetical regulatory framework exhibit significant spatial variation across counties in the united states

estimation of technical inefficiency in panel data models with firm and time specific effects abstract this paper uses a panel data model and develops methods to estimate production function parameters and technical inefficiency the model distinguishes technical inefficiency from firm and time specific effects determinants of technical inefficiency is introduced by allowing its mean to be a function of exogenous variables both random and fixed effects treatment of firm and time specific effects are considered in estimation

environmental regulation and us state level production abstract using us data from 1977 1986 we estimate the impact of environmental policy on state level output using parametric and nonparametric techniques while the nonparametric approach yields additional insights the lack of a relationship between environmental regulation and output is robust

a stochastic frontier analysis of financing constraints on investment is shown that investment under financing constraints can be modeled as a one sided deviation from a frictionless investment level and that effects of financing constraints can be identified and quantified by imposing a distributional assumption on the effects panel data on taiwanese manufacturing firms between 1989 and 1996 are used in the estimation it is found that 1 some of the sorting criteria used in the literature do not have significant and monotonic relationships with the degrees of financing constraint resulting in problematic sample separations and 2 the effects of financial liberalization in taiwan are such that the investment efficiency improved over time for a typical firm and the improvement was particularly large for smaller firms

footloose and pollution free in numerous studies economists have found little empirical evidence that environmental regulations affect trade flows in this paper we propose and test several common explanations for why the effect of environmental regulations on trade may be difficult to detect we demonstrate that whereas most trade occurs among industrialized economies environmental regulations have stronger effects on trade between industrialized and developing economies we find that for most industries pollution abatement costs are a small component of total costs and are unrelated to trade flows in addition we show that those industries with the largest pollution abatement costs also happen to be the least geographically mobile or footloose after accounting for these distinctions we measure a significant effect of pollution abatement costs on imports from developing countries and in pollution intensive footloose industries

capital controls competitive depreciation and the technological frontier abstract this paper considers the internal and external welfare effects of international capital controls and real exchange rate undervaluation in a multi country setting i present a dynamic open economy macro model with an endogenously determined rate of interest on internationally traded assets all countries produce tradable and nontradable goods using technology that converges over time to a global frontier the model quantifies the welfare effects of the unilateral implementation of capital controls that depreciate the real exchange rate in economies both already at and converging to the technological frontier for developing economies i demonstrate that such government interventions may constitute beggar thy neighbor policies

regional convergence evidence from a new state by state capital stock series this paper seeks to reconcile the growth empirics technique of mankiw romer and weil 1992 with the empirical results of barro and sala i martin 1991 through the development of a new database covering the 1977 96 period we create state by state capital stock and gross investment estimates by apportioning the national capital stock among the states using these estimates along with gross state product and employment data we find evidence that the solow growth model explains state wide growth during this period we consistently find a rate of convergence of around 2 our results as a consequence suggest that the empirical results of barro and sala i martin are driven by the neoclassical growth process of solow

cross country heterogeneity in intertemporal substitution abstract we collect 2735 estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption from 169 published studies that cover 104 countries during different time periods the estimates vary substantially from country to country even after controlling for 30 aspects of study design our results suggest that income and asset market participation are the most effective factors in explaining the heterogeneity households in rich countries and countries with high stock market participation substitute a larger fraction of consumption intertemporally in response to changes in expected asset returns micro level studies that focus on sub samples of rich households or asset holders also find systematically larger values of the elasticity

public infrastructure investment interstate spatial spillovers and manufacturing costs effects of public infrastructure investment on the costs and productivity of private enterprises have proven difficult to quantify empirically one piece of this puzzle that has received little attention is spatial spillovers we apply a cost function model to 1982 1996 state level u s manufacturing data to untangle the private cost saving effects of inter and intrastate public infrastructure investment we implement two spatial adaptations including a spatial spillover index in the theoretical model and allowing for spatial autocorrelation in the stochastic structure recognizing such spillovers both increases the estimated magnitude and significance of cost savings from intrastate public infrastructure and augments these productive effects

environmental regulation and u s state level production using data from the u s over the period 1977 1986 we estimate the impact of environmental policy on state level output using both parametric and nonparametric techniques we find that while the added flexibility of the nonparametric approach yields much insight the lack of a relationship between environmental regulation and output is quite robust

are medical prices declining evidence from heart attack treatments we address long standing problems in measuring medical inflation by estimating two types of price indices the first a service price index prices specific medical services as does the current cpi the second a cost of living index measures a quality adjusted cost of treating a health problem we apply these indices to heart attack treatment between 1983 and 1994 more frequent reweighting and accounting for price discounts lowers the measured price change for heart attacks by three percentage points annually accounting for quality change lowers it further we estimate that the real cost of living index fell about 1 percent annually

how do environmental regulation and environmental decentralization affect green total factor energy efficiency evidence from china abstract green development is critical for china s economic transformation enhancing green total factor energy efficiency hereafter gtfee is vital to emission reduction and to win win industrial development this study uses the panel data of 30 chinese provinces for the period 2005 2016 to investigate the relationship between environmental regulation and china s gtfee the spatial durbin model is employed to control for the possible spatial spillover effect a dynamic threshold panel model that can effectively address the endogeneity problem and regional heterogeneity is utilized to examine the potential non linear relationship between environmental regulation and gtfee under different conditions of environmental decentralization the estimation results indicate that there is a significant u shaped relationship between environmental regulation and china s gtfee with the further expansion of environmental decentralization the local government s autonomous choice of pollution control is improved the improvement of environmental decentralization can lead to negative moderating effect of environmental regulation on gtfee additionally the regression results of dynamic threshold model show that environmental decentralization can increase the negative influences of environmental regulation on gtfee interestingly the non linear impact of environmental regulation on gtfee is dependent on the specific type of environmental decentralization higher degree of environmental decentralization can lead to an increase in the restraining effect of environmental regulation on gtfee however an improvement in the decentralization of environmental supervision and environmental monitoring can increase the negative influences of environmental regulation on gtfee

efficiency of the swedish pork industry a farm level study using rotating panel data 1976 1988 abstract this paper investigates the issues of technical efficiency technical changes and bias in technical change in the swedish pork industry using rotating panel data we use a generalized cobb douglas model where the coefficients are linear functions of time this allows input elasticities to vary over time technical changes and bias in technical change are farm and time specific the model distinguishes farm heterogeneity from technical inefficiency we use a corrected least squares procedure to estimate the model the data consists of a rotating panel of 450 pork producing farms with a total number of 1506 observations during the period of 1976 1988 we compare the productive performance of farms by size of farm land and animal stock and over time the empirical results show among other things that technical change is found to be positive but rapidly declining during the period 1976 1980 turning into technical regress during the remaining period 1981 to 1988 the mean technical efficiency is found to be around 91

the potential estimation and factor analysis of china s energy conservation on thermal power industry new huadu business school research fund national social science foundation of china 12zd059 ministry of education 10gbj013

environmental regulation and u s states technical inefficiency abstract using data on 48 states from 1982 1994 we estimate the impact of environmental regulation on technical inefficiency of u s states manufacturing sector the result indicates that environmental stringency has significant and positive impacts on u s states technical inefficiency

production frontiers and panel data an application to u s class 1 railroads in this article the appropriateness of inefficiency measures obtained directly from the production function as in schmidt and sickles 1984 is examined relative to those provided by a the cost function aproach b klein s approach and c the iterative sur technique efficiency rankings yielded by different methods are also compared and tested

on the estimation of technical and allocative inefficiency using stochastic frontier functions the case of u s class 1 railroads in this paper the author considers specification and estimation of technical and allocative inefficiency in a cost minimizing framework using panel data some distinguishing features of the model are 1 the functional form of the production technology is flexible enough to allow elasticity to vary across firms 2 allocative inefficiency coming from managerial errors ou t of inertia ignorance etc are separated from random errors in optimization 3 the panel nature of the data allows the estimation of input and firm specific allocative inefficiency together with technical inefficiency and 4 subdivision of the sample period allows one to make efficiency comparisons of each firm over the subperiods and to check the stability of the parameter estimates copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

human capital and convergence a production frontier approach using nonparametric production frontier methods we decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to technological change shifts in the world production frontier technological catch up movements toward or away from the frontier and physical and human capital accumulation movements along the frontier we find that 1 technological change is decidedly nonneutral 2 productivity growth is driven primarily by physical and human capital accumulation 3 the increased international dispersion of productivity is explained primarily by physical capital accumulation and 4 international polarization the shift from a unimodal to a bimodal distribution is brought about primarily by efficiency changes technological catch up

estimation of growth convergence using a stochastic production frontier approach abstract in this paper we estimate stochastic world production frontiers econometrically taking country heterogeneity into account from the estimated frontier we obtain estimates of technical change technological catch up efficiency improvement convergence and scale related components of total factor productivity tfp growth

the terms of trade the real exchange rate and economic fluctuations this paper examines the relationship between terms of trade and business cycles using a three sector intertemporal equilibrium model and a large multicountry database results show that terms of trade shocks account for nearly one half of actual gdp variability the model explains weak correlations between net exports and terms of trade the harberger laursen and metzler effect and produces large and weakly correlated deviations from purchasing power parity and real interest rate parity terms of trade shocks cause real appreciations and positive interest differentials although productivity shocks have opposite effects the puzzle that welfare gains of international asset trading are negligible is left unresolved copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the measurement and sources of technical inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry production function models are estimated with a time series of cross section data on indonesian weaving establishments the sources of technical inefficiency are investigated three firm attributes are identified as being potentially related to firm efhciency tbey are firm ownership age and size the importance of these attributes as sources of inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry is investigated and the implications of the find ings discussed

productivity change in health care research on productivity change in health care has surged in recent years this interest reflects both policy interest in the value of health care and improving data capabilities and methods for productivity research because of the central importance of quality change in health care this research has directly or indirectly considered not only changes in the costs of producing health services e g the cost of a hospital day but also changes in the benefits of health services for patient health some studies have compared overall changes in population health to changes in aggregate medical expenditures for example recent studies by kevin murphy and robert topel 1999 and william nordhaus 1999 suggest that the value to current and future generations of americans of improvements in life expectancy in recent decades has exceeded 2 trillion per year accounting for the improvements in ageadjusted functional health that also appear to have occurred in recent decades e g kenneth manton et al 1997 makes the improvement in health even greater cutler and elizabeth richardson 1999 estimate that even if only 25 percent of the overall improvement in health is attributable to medical care then health care productivity has risen yet translating this into health care productivity calculations leaves many issues unresolved it is not immediately clear how to determine the share of health improvements that result from medical care further even if overall productivity improvements have been high it is possible that many changes in health care productivity have been less valuable identifying areas of high and low past and potential future productivity improvements would be helpful for guiding policymakers for all of these reasons much of the recent research on health care productivity has focused on explicit analysis of costs and outcomes for certain common serious health problems where other factors can be controlled for and relevant inputs and health outcomes can be measured in this paper we review the state of the art of the evidence on health care productivity we first summarize a set of recent productivity studies of common conditions that account for a substantial fraction of overall medical spending these studies also illustrate the range of methods that have been used in disease level productivity studies in general the studies show rather substantial productivity gains in care we then present new evidence on productivity of treatment for breast cancer a disease that at least in its most common forms in adults many experts believe has seen little improvement in benefits of care over time considering cancer allows us to focus on a condition where there is no presumption that medical care has been worthwhile and where there are a host of complex issues related to case finding the timing of diagnoses and chronic care we find that the treatment of cancer has had at best small productivity improvements outcomes have improved more on a per case basis than when considering the population as a whole

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