the use of the scaling property in a frontier analysis of a system of equations this article presents a one stage efficiency frontier analysis based on the scaling property this type of analysis is a not very often applied in empirical work in spite of its nice features due

ex day behavior tax or short term trading effects this study examines the behavior of share prices around the ex dividend dates before and after the introduction of the 1988 income and corporation taxes act that reduced substantially the tax differential between dividends and capital gains in the united kingdom we find that in the pre 1988 period when the differential taxation of dividends and capital gains is high ex day returns are positive and significant in contrast in the post 1988 period ex day returns are in most cases negative and insignificant further analysis reveals that while ex day returns are significantly related to dividend yield and to the length of the settlement period they are not affected by the commonly used measures of transaction costs such as the bid ask spread and trading volume or by the day of week month of the year type of dividend distribution or number of days to the actual receipt of the cash dividend we conclude that taxation affects significantly ex day share prices in the previous studies have documented that the risk adjusted abnormal returns on the ex dividend dates are positive and significantly related to the dividend yield the interpretation of these findings is however controversial the question relates to what category of investors sets ex day prices elton and

dividend stripping risk exposure and the effect of the 1984 tax reform act on the ex dividend day behavior this article investigates the importance of risk exposure and the effects of the 1984 tax reform act on the ex dividend day behavior the tax reform appears to have inhibited short term trading activities by increasing the risk exposure of incorporated traders moreover stocks for which existing listed options permitted the reduction of risk through hedged dividend stripping strategies were affected much less from the new tax code than their nonoptionable counterparts this implies that risk affects investors dividend yield choice and that the ex dividend day behavior may be caused in part by the existence of risk premia copyright 1989 by the university of chicago

amalgamations of universities are there economics of scale or scope this paper estimates a multiple output cost function for australian universities the estimates are used to evaluate the cost savings arising from the amalgamation of two or more institutions thes

penalized quantile regression with semiparametric correlated effects an application with heterogeneous preferences this paper proposes new 1 penalized quantile regression estimators for panel data which explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity associated with covariates we conduct monte carlo simulations to assess the small sample performance of the new estimators and provide comparisons of new and existing penalized estimators in terms of quadratic loss we apply the techniques to two empirical studies first the new method is applied to the estimation of labor supply elasticities and we find evidence that positive substitution effects dominate negative wealth effects at the middle of the conditional distribution of hours the overall effect tends to be larger at the lower tail which suggests that changes in taxes have different effects across the response distribution second we estimate consumer preferences for nutrients from a demand model using a large scanner dataset of household food purchases we show that preferences for nutrients vary across the conditional distribution of expenditure and across genders and emphasize the importance of fully capturing consumer heterogeneity in demand modeling both applications highlight the importance of estimating individual heterogeneity when designing economic policy

an empirical model of labor supply in a life cycle setting this paper formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labor supply using theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behavior a two step empirical analysis yields estimates of intertemporal and uncompensated substitution effects which provide the information needed to predict the response of hours of work to life cycle wage growth and shifts in the lifetime wage path

nonparametric estimation of the impact of taxes on female labor supply this paper proposes a simple extension of nonparametric estimation methods for nonlinear budget set models derived in blomquist and newey 2002 to censored dependent variables the nonparametric method is applied to estimate female labor supply elasticities using data on married women from the 1985 and 1989 waves of the panel study of income dynamics exploiting the substantial variation in budget sets caused by the tax reform act of 1986 as a source of identification the estimated wage elasticities from this new method are 0 56 overall and 0 27 on the intensive margin the income elasticity estimates are close to 0 67 overall and 0 13 on the intensive margin compared with the linear labor supply model the estimated elasticities are usually larger for the nonparametric specifications that account for nonlinear budget sets copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

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

dividend yield and expected returns abstract previous research examining the relation between dividend yield and equity returns documents a u shaped pattern arising from the positive capm adjusted average excess return of zero dividend firms in contrast this paper reports that zero dividend firms earn negative average excess returns relative to firms of similar size despite the apparent conformity of these results to the predictions of after tax asset pricing models the negative size adjusted excess returns cannot be drive solely by tax effects these excess returns which are concentrated in the initial zero dividend years and approach 1 per month are attributed to possible dividend expectation effects rather than taxes

capital gains tax and equity values empirical test of stock price reaction to the introduction and reduction of capital gains tax exemption abstract this paper evaluates the differential effect on stock prices of the introduction in canada of 500 000 capital gains tax exemption and the reduction of this limit to 100 000 two years later using the seemingly unrelated regression methodology and controlling for thin trading and heteroscedasticity the empirical evidence indicates that the changes in capital gains tax laws had a differential effect on low dividend yield and high dividend yield stocks on both occasions while the evidence indicates that the stock market anticipated the 1985 capital gains tax law changes the significant market reaction to the 1987 reduction of the exemption occurred a day before and after the reading of the tax reform proposals in parliament thus it can be inferred from the results that despite the presence of tax sheltering opportunities in canada changes in capital gains tax laws affect equity values

nonparametric estimation of education productivity incorporating nondiscretionary inputs with an application to dutch schools in this paper we develop a malmquist productivity index for public sector production characterized by the influence of environmental variables we extend johnson and ruggiero 2011 to the more general case of variable returns to scale to further decompose the malmquist productivity index into technical efficiency scale and environmental change we apply our model to analyze productivity of dutch schools using 2002 2007 data the results indicate that the environment influences the productivity index as well as the technical efficiency scale and environmental change components we see that schools with a moderate classification of environment have the highest productivity numbers in line with expectations schools with the worst environment also perform worse and would perform better with an improved environment

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

new evidence that taxes affect the valuation of dividends this paper uses british data to examine the effects of dividend taxes on investors relative valuation of dividends and capital gains british data offer great potential to illuminate the dividends and taxes question since there have been two radical changes and several minor reforms in british dividend tax policy during the last 30 years studying the relationship between dividends and stock price movements during different tax regimes offers an ideal controlled experiment for assessing the effects of taxes on investors valuation of dividends using daily data on a small sample of firms and monthly data on a much broader sample we find clear evidence that taxes affect the equilibrium relationship between dividend yields and market returns these findings suggest that taxes are important determinants of security market equilibrium and deepen the puzzle of why firms pay dividends financial economists have long been puzzled by corporate dividend behavior many individual investors should value a dollar of corporate dividends less than a dollar of corporate retentions because the former gives rise to greater tax liabilities corporations however face equal costs of paying out dividends and retaining earnings miller and modigliani 31 demonstrated that in the absence of taxes dividend policy should have no effect on share valuation if dividends are tax penalized however a value maximizing firm should pay no dividends widespread dividend payments to taxable investors are therefore surprising in 1981 dividend tax revenues in the united states were estimated to exceed 20 billion dollars indeed some have interpreted the large volume of dividends paid as evidence against the rational behavior postulates typically used by economists the dividend question has stimulated a large theoretical and empirical literature concerned with the qluestion of investors valuation of dividends in particular the question of how taxes affect the market valuation of dividends has generated considerable controversy numerous studies including auerbach 2 litzenberger and ramaswamy 24 26 morgan 34 and rosenberg and marathe

stock market anomalies abstract this paper reports evidence documenting the presence of a number of irregularities in stock price behaviour of firms on the london stock exchange the size effect is not only not the sole anomaly but is not even the most dominant one specifically investment strategies based on dividend yield pe ratios and share prices appear as profitable if not more as a strategy concentrating on firm size although there is a large degree of interdependency between all four effects it is still apparent that the dividend yield and pe ratios subsume the size and share price effects

portfolio rebalancing and the effective taxation of dividends and capital gains following the tax reform act of 1986 abstract the tax reform act tra of 1986 among other things equalized the nominal taxation of dividend and capital gains income the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that ordinary investors rebalanced their portfolio holdings in response to the new taxes such rebalancing appears to have concentrated on liquid stocks indicating that transaction costs are an important consideration for ordinary investors involved in restructuring their portfolio holdings the tax clientele relationships that existed prior to the new act were distorted temporarily but have reappeared by 1988 interestingly investors post reform effective tax rates still give a preference to capital gains as they did prior to the tax reform

test for tax effects in the pricing of financial assets this paper tests four competing hypotheses regarding taxation and the pricing of financial assets no differential tax effects in the pricing of stocks or bonds the equilibrium condition described by miller 1977 the two parameter after tax pricing equations of brennan 1970 and litzenberger and ramaswamy 1979 and dividend related clientele effects described by elton and gruber 1970 and litzenberger and ramaswamy 1980 these hypotheses make substantially different predictions about the impact of taxes on financial decisions however when stated in terms of returns the hypotheses imply parameter restrictions with the same functional form the commonality of the parameter restrictions allows simultaneous testing of all four models by testing the form of the parameter restrictions this approach differs from that of previous researchers who have by and large implicitly assumed that the parameter restrictions implied by the respective models hold see elton and gruber 1970 black and scholes 1973 1974 litzenberger and ramaswamy 1979 1980 miller and scholes 1982 conditional on this assumption parameter estimates have been made and this paper tests four models describing the impact of taxes on financial asset returns no tax effects miller s equilibrium the twoparameter pricing models of brennan and litzenberger and ramaswamy and taxinduced dividend clientele effects these tests are carried out by casting the hypotheses in terms of systems of equations and identifying the parameter restrictions implied by each of the hypotheses the systems approach is particularly useful for testing for clientele effects because we are able to identify withinand between equation restrictions without specifying the marginal tax rate of the clientele which holds a particular security my results suggest that none of tax motivated hypotheses is descriptive of the data this paper is a distillation of several research projects i have undertaken in the last two years special thanks are in order to g constantinides e fama j ingersoll a madansky and m scholes i owe a particularly important debt to merton miller for help and encouragement finally i would like to thank steve buser and e han kim

effect of class size on economies of scale and marginal costs in higher education the impact of class size on economies of scale and marginal costs in higher education is examined a multiproduct translog cost function is estimated using data from a single university the results indicate that failure to control for class size may lead to biased estimates of economies of scale and relative marginal costs evidence of constant returns to scale for schools that expand output holding class size constant is found and increasing returns to scale if class size is allowed to expand the marginal cost of graduate students is found to be 4 3 to 8 98 times that of undergraduates

dividends and capital asset prices tax based dividend models of capital asset pricing assume that dividends are known at the time prices are set dividends which are announced and paid in the same month and dividends which were expected but cancelled in the month constitute surprises which interfere with many empirical tests of the effects of expected dividend yield on returns this paper avoids these problems by relating returns to forecasts of dividend yield obtained from past data three distinct views of the importance of dividends to investors have received support at one time or another according to the two most important views dividends have a neutral and a negative effect on security prices respectively miller and modigliani 1 and miller and scholes 12 13 favor complete substitutability of dividends and capital gain brennan 6 and litzenberger and ramaswamy 9 have developed models which incorporate differential taxation of income and capital gain in these models the tax disadvantage of income changes the investor s portfolio problem from one of optimization of mean and variance of portfolio before tax return to optimization in after tax terms stocks with relatively large dividend yields should provide high expected returns and so sell for low prices to compensate the investor for the tax much of the empirical evidence seems to favor the view that tax disadvantages of dividend income do not escape investors attention and that returns are higher when they include dividend income to compensate the investor for the tax liability however interpretation of the available evidence is difficult and it is significant that most of these researchers remain unconvinced that their own findings can be satisfactorily explained by tax effects ball brown finn and officer 1 interpret their estimates as being far too strong to be explained in terms of differential taxation blume 3 reaches a similar conclusion but litzenberger and ramaswamy attribute their results to the tax disadvantage of

misspecification of capital asset pricing this study documents empirical anomalies which suggest that either the simple one period capital asset pricing model capm is misspecified or that capital markets are inefficient in particular portfolios based on firm size or earnings price e p ratios experience average returns systematically different from those predicted by the capm furthermore the abnormal returns persist for at least two years this persistence reduces the likelihood that these results are being generated by a market inefficiency rather the evidence seems to indicate that the equilibrium pricing model is misspecified however the data also reveals that an e p effect does not emerge after returns are controlled for the firm size effect the firm size effect largely subsumes the e p effect thus while the e p anomaly and value anomaly exist when each variable is considered separately the two anomalies seem to be related to the same set of missing factors and these factors appear to be more closely associated with firm size than e p ratios

the public accounting industry production function abstract a translog function is specified to represent the relation between revenue and human resource inputs in public accounting firms estimation of the model using a balanced panel of annual data for 64 large cpa firms for the period 1995 1999 indicates that increasing returns to scale prevail in the public accounting industry justifying recent merger and acquisition activities among accounting firms average marginal revenue product of partners increased monotonically from 1995 to 1998 decreased slightly in 1999 and was about nine times that of other professionals during 1995 1999 the public accounting industry exhibited continuing improvement in productivity over the 5 years

the empirical foundations of the arbitrage pricing theory abstract this paper uses maximum likelihood factor analysis of large cross sections to examine the validity of the arbitrage pricing theory apt we are unable to explain the expected returns on firm size portfolios although we do explain the expected returns on portfolios formed on the basis of dividend yield and own variance where risk adjustment using the usual capm market proxies fails we also compare alternate versions of the apt and sharply reject the hypothesis that basis portfolios formed to mimic the factors span the mean variance frontier of the individual assets

a simulation based approach to the study of coefficient of variation of dividend yields abstract existing empirical studies of dividend yields and dividend policies either make no assumption or the normal distribution of the dividend yields data the statistical results will be biased because they cannot reflect the finite support set property of dividend yields which can only range from 0 to 1 we posit that the assumption that dividend yields follow a beta distribution is more appropriate the coefficient of variation cv is used to measure the stability of dividend yields if we assume dividend yields follow a normal distribution then the maximum likelihood estimate for coefficient of variation is given by s x this only gives us a point estimate which cannot depict the full picture of the sampling distribution of the coefficient of variation a simulation based approach is adopted to estimate cv under the beta distribution this approach will give us a point estimate as well as the empirical sampling distribution of cv with this approach we study the stability of dividend yields of the hang seng index and its sub indexes of the hong kong stock market and compare the results with the traditional approach

the canadian tax reform and its effect on stock prices a note the effect of personal taxation on stock prices remains controversial while some researchers have found evidence of a tax effect in the stock market others have found evidence to the contrary this paper provides additional empirical evidence on the effect of the differential taxation of dividends and capital gains on stock prices by analyzing stock price changes around the 1971 canadian tax reform and its subsequent amendments in 1977 the results show that changes in the taxation of cash dividends and capital gains affected high yield and lowyield stocks listed on the toronto stock exchange tse differently section i of the paper describes the tax changes the method used to analyze the tax effect is described in section ii section iii reports the results and conclusions are presented in section iv

ex dividend stock price behavior and arbitrage opportunities this paper investigates the relation between ex dividend stock price behavior and arbitrage oppor tunities in a continuous trading frictionless economy the authors demonstrate that it is possible for the ex dividend stock price drop to differ from the dividend and still short term traders cannot gene rate arbitrage profits the argument is independent of transactions c osts the relevance of this insight to estimating the marginal tax br acket based on ex dividend stock price drops is explored furthermore this insight is also applied to the area of option pricing in which the special class of escrowed dividend stock price processes is stud ied the authors show that most elements from this class of stock pri ce processes generate invalid option pricing formulas copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

the effect of personal taxes on common stock prices the case of a belgian tax reform abstract this paper analyses how a belgian tax reform affected the relative pricing of securities with differential tax treatment of dividends the results show that stock prices reflect their relative personal tax advantage and the price differentials are significantly related to dividend yield

income transfers and assets of the poor contrary to the predictions of the standard life cycle model many low lifetime income households accumulate little wealth relative to their incomes compared to households with high lifetime income i use data from the panel study of income dynamics and a correlated random effects generalized method of moments estimator to decompose the rich poor gaps in wealth to permanent income ratio into the portions attributable to differences in characteristics such as labor market earnings income uncertainty observed demographics and the utilization of transfer programs which may have stringent income and liquid asset tests and those attributable to differences in the estimated coefficients on the respective characteristics the results suggest that wealth to permanent income ratios are increasing in permanent labor income and income uncertainty but that transfer income with or without asset tests discourages liquid asset accumulation the decompositions indicate that most of the rich poor wealth gap is attr

marginal stockholder tax effects and ex dividend day price behavior evidence from taxable versus nontaxable closed end funds almost all research on the movement of stock prices on ex dividend days has found that prices decline by less than the dividend though this is consistent with tax effects several papers have argued that this phenomenon could be caused by market microstructure effects in this paper we make use of a natural experiment that provides support for the tax explanations of ex dividend behavior some closed end funds have taxable and some have nontaxable dividend distributions both types are subject to taxes on capital gains the implication of this for ex dividendday price behavior is very different between these two types of funds if taxes matter this paper demonstrates that the direction of ex dividendday price behavior is consistent with a tax explanation and that ex dividend day price behavior changes as theory would suggest with changes in the tax law

taxes and company dividends a micro econometric investigation exploiting cross section variation we use panel data for 1 218 uk industrial and commercial companies between 1970 and 1990 to investigate whether dividends are affected by taxes cross section variation in the tax cost of paying dividends results from surplus advance corporation tax act affecting some firms during this period observations on firms moving into and out of surplus act allow us to identify the effect of taxes whilst controlling for unobserved firm specific influences our results suggest that the tax cost has a statistically significant and quantitatively important influence on dividends

return risk and yield evidence from ex ante data the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between return and yield in the context of ex ante data from the value line investment survey and by examining the role of dividends as a proxy for risk the use of ex ante data should substantially reduce the confounding of tax and information effects that has affected earlier studies heteroscedasticity is detected in the after tax capm and found to be negatively related to yield and positively related to beta maximum likelihood methods are used to correct for heteroscedasticity and generate efficient coefficient estimates using data for each of the years 1973 through 1983 there is an overall positive relationship between expected return and yield however coefficient estimates of yield are highly variable from year to year the relationship between dividend yields and security returns is currently a subject of extensive research in finance empirically a positive relationship is found by blume 5 gordon and bradford 12 elton gruber and rentzler

the market valuation of cash dividends abstract this paper re examines the case of citizens utilities a firm with one class of common stock which pays stock dividends and one which pays taxable cash dividends john long s 1978 study of the two shares relative prices suggests that investors may prefer cash dividends to equal sized stock dividends this paper finds that the cash dividend share s ex day price decline is less than their dividend payment stock dividend shares fall by nearly their full dividend the disparity between ex day dividend valuation and the observed prices of the two shares is inconsistent with some explanations of the demand for cash dividends

dividends taxes and common stock prices the ex dividend day behavior of common stock prices before the income tax this study examines the ex dividend day behavior of common stock prices before the enactment of the federal income tax on ex dividend days during the pre tax period stock prices fell on average by the full amount of the dividend the data are consistent with the hypothesis that i investors in the pre tax period value dividends and capital gains as perfect substitutes and ii the differential taxation of dividends and capital gains has since caused investors to discount the value of taxable cash dividends in relation to capital gains

selection criteria for a microeconometric model of labour supply the wide variety of observed behaviour that is displayed in survey data suggests that microeconometric models should allow a reasonable degree of flexibility in specification however since these models are generally used for policy analysis they are required to satisfy some degree of theoretical consistency this requirement has generally led to the adoption of rather simple inflexible models based on additive preferences or linear labour supply responses we estimate and test a sequence of models for the labour supply of married working women emphasizing the importance of testing both the thecretical and statistical assumptions underlying the models

estimating life cycle labor supply tax effects we present an econometrically tractable life cycle labor supply model for panel data including intertemporally progressive taxes on uncertai wage and nonwge incomes our two stage fixedeffects generalized method of moments approach first extimates intretemporal and then intertemporal preferences specification testing domonstrates the value of incorporating joint progressive taxation of labor and nonlabor incomes results for prime age men emphasize the roles played by hourly wage endogeneity worker specific effects the measure of the rate of pay and intemporal budget constaint nonseparability simulations indicate that recent tax reform while not self financing stimulated made labor supplied by about 3 percent and reduced deadweight loss about 16 percent

estimating economies of scope and scale under price risk and risk aversion this study uses duality to examine the effects of excluding output price risk and risk aversion on cost structures using data for kansas wheat and beef cow operations a dual risk model was used to determine multi product and product specific scale economies and economies of scope estimates for these measures were compared with those obtained from a deterministic model the results show that product specific scale economies are over estimated and economies of scope and multi product scale economies are under estimated for the deterministic model compared to the risk model

do prices and attributes explain international differences in food purchases food purchases differ substantially across countries we use detailed household level data from the united states france and the united kingdom to i document these differences ii estimate a demand system for food and nutrients and iii simulate counterfactual choices if households faced prices and nutritional characteristics from other countries we find that differences in prices and characteristics are important and can explain some difference e g united states france difference in caloric intake but generally cannot explain many of the compositional patterns by themselves instead it seems an interaction between the economic environment and differences in preferences is needed to explain cross country differences jel d12 i12 l11 l66 q11 food purchases differ across countries within countries over time and across demographic groups these differences seem to be correlated with rates of excess weight gain and diet related illness economists tend to attribute the difference in food purchases across markets to differences in prices an alternative explanation is that they are due to inherent differences in preferences and eating habits in this article we study the differences in food purchases and nutritional outcomes across countries focusing on the united states united kingdom and france we start by systematically documenting the differences in food purchases for consumption at home between the united states united kingdom and france we show that us households purchase different foods from french and uk households for example us households purchase more calories per person a greater percentage of those calories comes in the form of carbohydrates and a lower share in the form of proteins a higher share of expenditure is on drinks and prepared foods and

tax reform and ex dividend day behavior this paper investigates the effect of a major canadian tax reform on the ex dividend day behavior of companies on the toronto stock exchange the results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that price changes on ex dividend days reflect the relative taxation of dividends and capital gains for the representative investor but are consistent with the hypothesis that ex dividend day price behavior reflects short term trading activities

a simple examination of the empirical relationship between dividend yields and deviations from the capm abstract several papers have been published in recent years dealing with both the theoretical and the empirical impact of dividend yields on security returns dividends have been postulated as affecting stock returns because of tax effects agency costs and the wealth transfer hypothesis in this paper we perform a purely empirical examination of whether and to what extent deviations from the zero beta form of the capm are explained by divident yields the paper demonstrates that dividend yield has a large and statistically significant impact on return above and beyond that explained by the zero beta form of the capm this is consistent with the findings of litzenberger and ramaswamy in addition our results are consistent with the findings of small firm effects

the effect of prices on nutrition comparing the impact of product and nutrient specific taxes this paper provides an analysis of the role of prices in determining food purchases and nutrition using very detailed transaction level observations for a large nationally representative sample of us consumers over the period 2002 2007 using product specific nutritional information we develop a new method of partitioning the product space into relevant nutritional clusters that define a set of nutritionally bundled goods which parsimoniously characterize consumer choice sets we then estimate a large utility derived demand system over this joint product nutrient space that allows us to calculate price and expenditure elasticities using our structural demand estimates we simulate the role of product taxes on soda sugar sweetened beverages packaged meals and snacks and nutrient taxes on fat salt and sugar we find that a 20 nutrient tax has a significantly larger impact on nutrition than an equivalent product tax due to the fact that these are broader based taxes however the costs of these taxes in terms of consumer utility are only about 70 cents per household per day a sugar tax in particular is a powerful tool to induce healthier nutritive bundles among consumers

dividend capture in nasdaq stocks abstract we examine the importance of dividend capture trading in nasdaq stocks by testing for cross sectional relations between ex day abnormal returns and bid ask spreads throughout we find that ex day returns and spreads are positively related the relation increases across dividend yield quintiles and is strongest in high yield stocks the relation does not appear in a sample of non ex dividend days these findings indicate that dividend capture trading affects the ex day returns of at least some particularly high yield nasdaq stocks and that dividend capture trading is important for understanding ex dividend day returns

economies of scale and scope in flemish secondary schools this study estimates a multiproduct translog cost function for the entire population of 1011 flemish secondary schools in order to determine the degree of ray and product specific dis economies of scale as well as the degree of dis economies of scope three types of schools and seven major study fields can be distinguished student loads in these study fields are used as outputs produced by the schools evidence is found for ray economies of scale for the three types of schools even at output levels of 300 of the actual means although the cost elasticities of six out of seven outputs are close to zero most of the values indicating the degree of product specific economies of scale are negative suggesting diseconomies of scale however this can be explained by the considerable scope effects which are incorporated in the definition of the product specific economies of scale

the production characteristics of local public education a multiple product and input analysis since the seminal work of baumol panzer and willig 1 economists have become increasingly interested in incorporating the multifaceted nature of real world production functions into their empirical analyses multiproducts multiple inputs and the relaxation of the long run equilibrium condition are some prime examples of major innovations in production modeling an excellent example of this innovative literature is the study by cowing and holtmann 7 that focuses on the short run production characteristics associated with the hospital services industry specifically cowing and holtmann find evidence contrary to long run equilibrium and that economies of scope are at least as important as economies of scale in the production of hospital services moreover several empirical studies relating to the production characteristics of other goods and services such as higher education 6 crime prevention 9 electric utilities 15 and airlines 5 have provided ample evidence that these pertinent factors matter from both an econometric and a policy perspective the literature concerning the production characteristics of primary and secondary education however has lagged behind in terms of incorporating more realism into the analysis typically studies concerned with primary and secondary education production 2 3 13 14 maintain that schools operate at a long run equilibrium position and produce a single output with a single input i e teachers thus assuming away factors which these other industry studies have found to be significant in fact jimenez 12 is the only study to date on local primary and secondary education production that is based on less restrictive assumptions several limitations are associated with his research however each of these limitations reduce the generality of his findings concerning the production characteristics of primary and secondary education first jimenez employs a small sample to obtain estimates of various production characteristics bringing into question the overall