stochastic dea with ordinal data applied to a multi attribute pricing problem multiple attribute pricing problems are highly challenging due to the dynamic and uncertain features in the associated market in this paper we address the condominium multiple attribute pricing problem using data envelopment analysis dea in this study we simultaneously consider stochastic variables non discretionary variables and ordinal data and present a new type of dea model based on our proposed dea an effective performance measurement tool is developed to provide a basis for understanding the condominium pricing problem to direct and monitor the implementation of pricing strategy and to provide information regarding the results of pricing efforts for units sold as well as insights for future building design a case study is executed on a leading canadian condominium developer

multi factor performance measure model with an application to fortune 500 companies abstract the paper develops tools for reconciling diverse measures which characterize the financial performance of the fortune 500 companies the technology of data envelopment analysis dea is employed to determine a multi factor financial performance model which inherently recognizes tradeoffs among various financial measures this study offers an alternative perspective and characterization on the performance of the fortune 500 companies it is shown that the top ranked companies by revenue do not necessarily have top ranked performance viewed as being multidimensional only about 3 companies were operating on the best practice frontier substantial technical and scale inefficiencies are found decreasing returns to scale drs are uncovered among the relatively large revenue top ranked companies the study of congestion shows that a reduction in current levels of employees assets and equity may actually increase revenue and profit levels factor specific measures within the framework of multidimensional measure are developed to further study the performance of companies and industries the performance of best practice frontier companies is analyzed by constructing reference share measures which indicate the role each frontier company plays in evaluating non frontier companies finally the reliability of the best practice frontier is examined

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

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

commercial branch performance evaluation and results communication in a canadian bank a dea application abstract in this paper we focus on evaluating the performance of the commercial branches of a large canadian bank using data envelopment analysis two production models are considered in this country wide evaluation one model looking directly at resource usage is most useful to the branch manager the other model incorporating financial results is more geared towards senior management we introduce non discretionary factors to reflect specific aspects of the environment a branch is operating in such as risk and economic growth rate of the region both input and output multipliers are constrained by incorporating market prices as well as managerial preferences in order to get effectiveness measures the cost minimisation study led to valuable results pertaining to the performance of individual branches notable is the methodology introduced here that shows how to present graphical and numeric outcomes to managers gap maps pie charts and target tables are produced for each branch to provide performance goals for the managers useful information has also been obtained at the district level output oriented models were analysed to reflect the bank s recent emphasis towards growth in some areas

agriculture s environmental externalities dea evidence for french agriculture the existence of persistent technical inefficiency offers the opportunity for a free lunch not typically implied by the neoclassical theory of the firm when external effects are related to the use of particular inputs reduction of persistent technically inefficient levels of input use represents a means of reducing external impacts an important example is found in agriculture where substantial environmental impacts are generated by particular inputs within this context this paper considers the usefulness of data envelopment analysis dea for estimation of potential input reductions and assessment of potential reductions of environmental impacts of agricultural inputs an application for french cereal production provides estimates that indicate that substantial potential exists for reduction of input use and environmental impacts

efficiency and environmental factors in the us electricity transmission industry the electricity industry in most developed countries has been restructured over recent decades with the aim of improving both service quality and firm performance regulated segments e g transmission still provide the infrastructure for the competitive segments and represent a significant share of the total price paid by final customers however there is a lack of empirical studies that analyse firms performance in the electricity transmission sector in this paper an empirical analysis of us electricity transmission companies is conducted for the period 2001 2009 we use alternative stochastic frontier models that allow us to identify the determinants of firms inefficiency these models also permit us to control for weather conditions potentially one of the most decisive uncontrollable factors in electricity transmission our results suggest that weather conditions clearly have an influence on transmission costs and that there is room for improvement in the management of us electricity transmission systems regulators should also be aware that more adverse conditions generate higher levels of inefficiency and that achieving long term efficiency improvements tends to worsen firms short term relative performance

are hospitals seasonally inefficient evidence from washington state efficiency measurement has been one of the most extensively explored areas of health services research over the past two decades despite this attention few studies have examined whether a provider s efficiency varies on a monthly quarterly or other sub annual basis this article presents an empirical study that looks for evidence of seasonal inefficiency using a quarterly panel of general acute care hospitals from washington state we find that hospital efficiency does vary over time however the nature of this dynamic inefficiency depends on the type of efficiency being measured our results suggest that technical and cost efficiency vary by quarter allocative and scale efficiency also vary on a quarterly basis but only if the data are jointly disaggregated by quarter and another firm specific factor such as size or operating status thus future research corporate decisions and government policies designed to improve the efficiency of hospital care need to account for seasonal trends in hospi

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

measuring and forecasting regional environmental and economic efficiency in italy abstractenvironmental and economic efficiency has being receiving growing attention among researchers in general terms this concept is related to the capability of the economic systems to employ natural resources efficiently so as to increase economic and human wealth this clearly implies that both the economic and ecological aspects of decisions ought to be considered bearing this in mind this article considers economic and ecological performance together by applying data envelopment analysis and the malmquist productivity index to investigate the efficiency of the 20 italian regions from 2004 to 2011 the results reveal that the northern regions have been more efficient than the southern ones highlighting the strong geographical differences between the two furthermore this article uses the grey system theory to forecast regional economic and environmental efficiency the results of the forecasting analysis show that the north south duality remains strong and will possibly increase since the r

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

benchmarking urban energy efficiency in the uk this study asks what is the best way to measure urban energy efficiency there has been recent interest in identifying efficient cities so that best practices can be shared a process known as benchmarking previous studies have used relatively simple metrics that provide limited insight on the complexity of urban energy efficiency and arguably fail to provide a fair measure of urban performance using a data set of 198 urban uk local administrative units three methods are compared ratio measures regression residuals and data envelopment analysis the results show that each method has its own strengths and weaknesses regarding the ease of interpretation ability to identify outliers and provide consistent rankings efficient areas are diverse but are notably found in low income areas of large conurbations such as london whereas industrial areas are consistently ranked as inefficient the results highlight the shortcomings of the underlying production based energy accounts ideally urban energy efficiency benchmarks would be built on consumption based accounts but interim recommendations are made regarding the use of efficiency measures that improve upon current practice and facilitate wider conversations about what it means for a specific city to be energy efficient within an interconnected economy

estimating technical and allocative efficiency in the public sector a nonparametric analysis of dutch schools abstract public sector output provision is influenced not only by discretionary inputs but also by exogenous environmental factors in this paper we extended the literature by developing a conditional dea estimator of allocative efficiency that allows a decomposition of overall cost efficiency into allocative and technical components while simultaneously controlling for the environment we apply the model to analyze technical and allocative efficiency of dutch secondary schools the results reveal that allocative efficiency represents a significant 37 percent of overall cost efficiency on average although technical inefficiency is still the dominant part furthermore the results show that the impact of environment largely differs between schools and that having a more unfavorable environment is very expensive to schools these results highlight the importance of including environmental variables in both technical and allocative efficiency analysis

evaluating the operational efficiency of major ports in the asia pacific region using data envelopment analysis in recent years as competition among international ports has intensified the impartial and objective evaluation of port operational efficiency has become increasingly important in enabling each individual port to understand its peculiar strengths and weaknesses as well as any immediate threats or opportunities that may affect its competitive environment this study applies ccr model bcc model and 3 stage dea model to evaluate the changes in efficiency that have taken place between 1998 and 2001 in 10 ports in the asia pacific region using cross period data the empirical results show that different model will lead to different result on average the efficiency estimated by 3 stage dea procedure is the highest while ccr efficiency is the lowest it should be noted that the efficiencies based on ccr and bcc model are somewhat lower than the 3 stage dea approaches because they do not take the environmental factors managerial inefficiency and statistical noises into account

business cycles in the united kingdom facts and fictions this paper documents the statistical properties of contemporary business fluctuations in the united kingdom we study the period 1956 90 using quarterly detrended data on key aggregate variables we compute selected moments of the data compare our results with those for the united states and rigorously test for dynamic instabilities our findings confirm the existence of substantive cyclical regularities both across countries and across time some notable cross country differences are also identified conclusions about stability are shown to be potentially sensitive to the method of testing in general cross correlations are appreciably more stable than standard deviations

efficiency measures and productivity indexes in the context of university library benchmarking data envelopment analysis dea has attracted considerable attention during the last few decades as an intuitively clear method for performance assessment theoretical developments have taken turns with empirical efficiency studies in this paper we empirically analyse performance differences across university libraries from different countries from a cross section and a longitudinal perspective we use the malmquist index approach to disentangle environmental efficiency from technical efficiency te to highlight performance differences eventually induced by environmental factors beyond the control of library management as well as to decompose productivity changes over time into changes in te and changes in technology in our cross section analysis we found that north american na libraries are more productive at higher input levels than the european libraries from germany and austria at which we looked in this contribution moreover the largest na libraries are still able to improve performance as t

anticipating the consequences of school reform a new use of dea we use dea type linear programming techniques to simulate a basic component of educational reform eliminating restrictions on the allocation of school personnel our technique allows us to identify potential output gains or equivalently potential cost savings from reform we can also identify which personnel groups are likely to gain and lose under this reform when we apply our model to a sample of texas school districts we find evidence that the educational establishment has substantial economic rents to protect from school reform and that the primary beneficiaries of reform are likely to be affluent school districts with few minority students the technique which relies on the relationship between the direct and indirect distance functions can be easily generalized to measure the potential gains from removing other input restrictions such as union work rules environmental regulations or deed restrictions

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

nonparametric analysis of educational costs abstract traditional economic analyses of the public sector that assume cost minimization are not consistent with political models of bureaucracy if costs are not minimized then estimated cost functions will be biased the purpose of this paper is to provide a flexible nonparametric technique based on farrell type efficiency measures to estimate public sector costs standard indices need to be modified to fit the special nature of public sector service provision which is characterized by an influence of exogenous variables on cost a useful by product is an index of environmental harshness faced by local governments for illustrative purposes this technique is applied to a sample of new york state school districts it is found that nearly 64 of districts are cost inefficient spending on average 1200 per pupil above the cost minimizing level in addition it is estimated that the average school district faces environmental cost of over 1700 per pupil

detrending stylized facts and the business cycle the stylized facts of macroeconomic time series can be presented by fitting structural time series models within this framework we analyse the consequences of the widely used detrending technique popularised by hodrick and prescott 1980 it is shown that mechanical detrending based on the hodrick prescott filter can lead investigators to report spurious cyclical behaviour and this point is illustrated with empirical examples structural time series models also allow investigators to deal explicitly with seasonal and irregular movements that may distort estimated cyclical components finally the structural framework provides a basis for exposing the limitations of arima methodology and models based on a deterministic trend with a single break

energy efficiency measurement in agriculture with imprecise energy content information abstract measuring energy efficiency is crucial when planning energy reduction policies however decision makers are understandably reluctant to act in the absence of solid data and results supporting a policy position this paper proposes a methodology to measure the energy efficiency of farms based on the data envelopment analysis dea approach in a manner similar to the cost framework we decompose energy efficiency measurements into technical and allocative efficiencies in energy contents of inputs in this study we replace input prices used in traditional economic efficiency measurements by their energy content we use the energy efficiency model to explore the optimal input mix that produces the current outputs at minimum energy consumption we demonstrate that this decomposition can help policy makers design accurate energy policies however the uncertainty of the data and more particularly the energy content of the inputs leads us to recommend using the methodologies to calculate the bounds of efficiency to obtain more plausible and robust results based on our analysis energy efficiency is not a fixed value and policy makers should consider it with caution we use a 2007 database of french farms specialised in field crops for empirical illustration

a conditional directional distance function approach for measuring regional environmental efficiency evidence from uk regions abstract this paper by using conditional directional distance functions as introduced by simar and vanhems j econometrics 166 2012 342 354 modifies the model by fare and grosskopf eur j operat res 157 2004 242 245 and examines the link between regional environmental efficiency and economic growth the proposed model using conditional directional distance functions incorporates the effect of regional economic growth on regions environmental efficiency levels the results from uk regional data reveal a negative relationship between regions gdp per capita and environmental inefficiency up to a certain gdp per capita level after that level it appears that the relationship becomes positive as an overall result the regional environmental inefficiency gdp per capita relationship appears to have a u shape form

a data envelopment analytic model for assessing the relative efficiency of the selling function abstract this paper presents a data envelopment analytic model for assessing the relative efficieny of sales units that simultaneously incorporates multiple sales outcomes controllable and uncontrollable resources and environmental factors the model enables comparisons among a reference set of sales units engaged in selling the same product service by deriving a single summary measure of relative sales efficiency in addition it provides insights into modifications that are necessary in order to enhance relative efficiency of an individual sales unit conditions when the sales unit has additional control over resources are explored and the effects on relative efficiency are examined an illustration of the model in the context of sales units from a sample of insurance companies demonstrates the critical features of the model

data envelopment analysis with resource constraints an alternative model with non discretionary factors abstract it is shown that supplying additional resources in order to achieve full efficiency is equivalent to expansion of the input output space with additional factors that are non discretionary resource intensive and resource extensive efficiencies are introduced and defined a numerical example is given

comparisons of business cycles in the ec idiosyncracies and regularities annual data since 1960 and the real business cycle model as a guidance the evidence suggests that there are remarkable similarities between the business cycle pattern of these countries despite significant differences in the patterns of fiscal and monetary policies and the terms of trade we take this evidence to suggest that the type of shocks and the propagation mechanism is fairly similar across the ec countries hence the process of european integration under a set of uniform institutions and policies should not be a problem as far as the business cycle is concerned

ciclos economicos e metodos de filtragem fatos estilizados para o caso brasileiro the paper examines the business cycle properties of a small set of real brazilian macroeconomic time series using a variety of detrending methods it is shown that both quantitatively and qualitatively stylized facts of brazilian business cycle vary widely across detrending methods and that alternative detrending filters extract different types of information from the data the paper also provides simulations of the hansen and prescott s 1995 and hansen s 1985 dynamic general equilibrium models the standard rbc model and the indivisible labor model and tries to match the facts of the artificial economy with those of the real economy implications and suggestions for current macroeconomic practice are provided

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

swedish business cycles 1861 1988 abstract we examine swedish business cycle data for 1861 1988 in the time domain as well as in the frequency domain there is evidence of a business cycle in the form of considerable spectral mass for cycles between three and eight years the variability of the series varies considerably over time for most series it is highest in the inter war period relative variability is fairly stable over time cross section ratios between moving standard deviations for the series do not change much comovements are also stable over time correlation coefficients do not change much either

efficiency and credit rating in taiwan banking data envelopment analysis estimation in this article we use the data envelopment analysis to measure the efficiency of banks before and after credit rating is taken into consideration and we also employ the malmquist productivity index to measure the total factor productivity changes from 2001 to 2003 the results are as follows 1 there is a positive relationship between the efficiency scores and credit rating and thus the credit rating can be a representative to evaluate the performance and quality of a bank 2 we use the wilconxon two sample test of nonparametric statistic to test the influences of credit rating the empirical result shows that the credit rating is proven to influence the efficiency of banks 3 the efficiency scores improve in both investment grade above tw bbb and speculation grade under tw bbb when credit rating is taken into consideration the empirical results show that the efficiency scores of banks with a high credit rating improved relatively more when compared to banks with a lower credit rating

assessment of china transit and economic efficiencies in a modified value chains dea model abstract this study incorporates the concepts of undesirable intermediate intermediate input uncontrollable input and undesirable output to the value chains model chen and zhu 2004 thereby creating a modified value chains model to compute transit and economic efficiencies in 30 regions of china the modified value chains model forms a more general formulation to the value added chains in the utilization of the above concepts it also provides an optimal intermediate measure which differs from the independent two stage measure empirical evaluations indicate that large scale transit development in china s coastal area does not necessarily represent higher transit efficiency because in the coastal area there is a lack of significant positive relationships between transit and economic efficiency high economic efficiency does not contribute to greater transit efficiency the finding also suggests that by simultaneously decreasing the quantity in passenger and freight transport transit and economic efficiencies have greatly improved in most regions of china

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

is dea useful in the regulation of water utilities a dynamic efficiency evaluation the discussion about public utilities efficiency and its management has become increasingly important in the last decades we focus on the distribution of water which is one of the most important natural resources marshall 1879 this research shows the relationship between efficiency and institutional factors such as management system for this purpose we have data about some spanish water utilities under different provision systems during the period 1985 to 2000 using data envelopment analysis dea we estimate potential cost savings in this context we will extend the results obtained by thanassoulis 2000a b in attempt to guide the regulation of this sector

the indian auto component industry estimation of operational efficiency and its determinants using dea in this paper the performance analysis of the indian auto component industry is carried out from the perspectives of an original equipment manufacturer and a component supplier various efficiency measures are estimated using data envelopment analysis with publicly available financial data on a representative sample of 50 firms the first stage analysis reveals various operational inefficiencies in the auto component industry which are subsequently decomposed into technical input mix and scale efficiencies the study finds evidence that a majority of the inefficient firms are operating in the diminishing returns to scale region and demonstrates potential savings through benchmark input targets a second stage analysis aimed at exploring root causes of inefficiencies finds that substitution of labour for capital could be causing a variety of inefficiencies including the input mix inefficiency in the indian component industry the empirical results also suggest that unlike the global auto supply chain higher average inventories are required for higher operational efficiencies in the indian context contrary to the popular expectations the technology licensing does not show significant influence on efficiency at least in the short term whereas efficient working capital management does result in higher operational efficiencies the study also unearths the need to reform labour laws which are significantly contributing to various inefficiencies in the indian component industry

a comparative application of data envelopment analysis and translog methods an illustrative study of hospital production this paper compares inferences about hospital cost and production correspondences from two different estimation models 1 the econometric modeling of the translog cost function and 2 the application of data envelopment analysis dea while there are numerous examples of the application of each approach to empirical data this paper provides insights into the relative strengths of the estimation methods by applying both models to the same data the translog results suggest that constant reruns are operant whereas the dea results suggest that both increasing and decreasing returns to scale may be observed in different segments of the production correspondence in turn suggesting that the translog model may be averaging diametrically opposite behavior on the other hand by examining the rate of output transformation both models agree that patient days devoted to care of children are more resource intensive than those devoted to adults or to the elderly in addition we compare estimates of technical efficiencies of individual hospitals obtained from the two methods the dea estimates are found to be highly related to the capacity utilization but no such relationship was found for the translog estimates this comparative application of different estimation models to the same data to obtain inferences about the nature of underlying cost and production correspondences sheds interesting light on the strengths of each approach and suggests the need for additional research comparing estimation models using real as well as simulated data

efficiency subsidies and environmental adaptation of animal farming under cap the purpose of this article is to model the interaction between the targets of the current cap environmental adaptation subsidies and efficiency q1 of animal farming to this end we first have to identify the production frontier and relative efficiency level for each animal oriented farm in the sample the production frontier and efficiency index for each type of farm assuming no specific production functions are identified using data envelope analysis dea techniques we then address the relationship between relative efficiency farm size and environmentally friendly behavior by carrying out a nonparametric regression of efficiency on economic size a proxy for the degree of environmental appropriateness and regional dummies calculations of the efficiency of the farms including direct subsidies are compared with the counterfactual exercise in the case in which direct subsidies are not considered finally we look for relations between subsidies and factors such as farm size efficiency and environmentally friendly behavior one key result shows that on average direct payments generally tend to increase efficiency however in most of the cases the mean efficiency decreases as the percentage of direct payments rises direct payments are found to be positively related to environmentally friendly production at least in germany however in general the direct payment system is not sufficient to offset the fact that the less environmentally friendly farms as well as the larger farms are more efficient

malmquist type indices in the presence of negative data an application to bank branches in this paper we develop an index and an indicator of productivity change that can be used with negative data for that purpose the range directional model rdm a particular case of the directional distance function is used for computing efficiency in the presence of negative data we use rdm efficiency measures to arrive at a malmquist type index which can reflect productivity change and we use rdm inefficiency measures to arrive at a luenberger productivity indicator and relate the two the productivity index and indicator are developed relative to a fixed meta technology and so they are referred to as a meta malmquist index and meta luenberger indicator we also address the fact that vrs technologies are used for computing the productivity index and indicator a requirement under negative data which raises issues relating to the interpretability of the index we illustrate how the meta malmquist index can be used not only for comparing the performance of a unit in two time periods but also for comparing the performance of two different units at the same or different time periods the proposed approach is then applied to a sample of bank branches where negative data were involved the paper shows how the approach yields information from a variety of perspectives on performance which management can use

an international comparison of hospital efficiency does institutional environment matter the consensus among many health economists is that no meaningful performance differences exist among for profit and non profit hospitals in the us but this topic has continued to be a matter of academic judicial and public policy interest a similar debate has ensued internationally regarding the potential efficiency gains from privatization of public enterprises in this paper we examine empirical evidence from the public highly regulated norwegian hospital sector and the private highly competitive and unregulated california hospital sector to ascertain whether institutional environment and level of market competition significantly affect the degree of productive efficiency in hospitals we compare and discuss the productive efficiency of four similar sets of hospitals operating in different institutional and competitive environments the four samples are carefully matched in the dimensions of sample size hospital size and average lengths of stay heterogeneity in output definition is used to co

the evolution and main determinants of productivity in brazilian electricity distribution 1998 2005 an empirical analysis abstract this paper estimates changes in the productivity of the brazilian electricity distribution sector using data envelopment analysis dea on a panel of 18 firms from 1998 to 2005 the study decomposes the productivity change of these distribution firms in terms of technical efficiency scale efficiency and technical progress this exercise aims to help the understanding of the main determinants of the evolution of productivity focusing its relationship with the restructuring process implemented in the 1990s tfp index records a yearly positive growth rate of 1 3 in the whole period under analysis for all firms technical change was the main component behind this evolution with an average growth of 2 1 per year while technical efficiency presented a yearly negative performance of 0 8 the results prove that in general terms the incentives generated in the reform process do not seem to have led the firms to behave in a more efficient manner

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

real business cycles in this paper we demonstrate how certain very ordinary economic principles lead maximizing individuals to choose consumption production plans that display many of the characteristics commonly associated with business cycles our explanation is entirely consistent with i rational expectations ii complete current information iii stable preferences iv no technological change v no long lived commodities vi no frictions or adjustment costs vii no government viii no money and ix no serial dependence in the stochastic elements of the environment we also provide a completely worked out example of the type of artificial economy we have in mind the time series properties of the example exhibit some major features of observed business cycles although this type of model may not be capable of explaining all of the regularities in actual business cycles we believe that it provides a useful well defined benchmark for assessing the relative importance of factors e g monetary disturbances

co2 emissions and logistics performance a composite index proposal abstract the importance of good logistics performance for low no fossil carbon economies is widely recognized especially because the transport sector is responsible for a substantial portion of the world s greenhouse gas emissions this research evaluates efficiency in the relationship between transport logistics performance as measured by the logistics performance index lpi and co2 emissions from the transport sector the slacks based measure sbm of the data envelopment analysis dea was used to construct a low carbon logistics performance index lclpi ranking a group of 104 countries that were selected using the available data the empirical model adopted one input co2 emissions for the transport sector and seven outputs gross domestic product gdp and the six components of the lpi gdp has been included as a non discretionary output because co2 emissions are directly dependent on a country s economic production while the lpi is a qualifier to evaluate how the composite index evolved over time we used an approach that combines the techniques of window analysis and the malmquist index considering the dea results the countries that performed best in terms of the lclpi were japan germany togo benin and the united states and the more evolved countries were luxemburg ireland lebanon and honduras for the purposes of lclpi validation and analysis the performances of the brics brazil russia india china and south africa countries were analyzed especially china which is the world s second largest co2 emitter the proposed composite index and the ranking of countries in terms of logistics performance and co2 emissions can help identify the best performing countries in low carbon logistics