a nonparametric cost approach to scale efficiency starting with farrell fieldhouse 1962 a host of notiparametric models have been developed for calculation of scale efficiency a common property of these models is that they are specified in terms of input output data duality theory has taught us that technological characteristics may be analyzed from either the primal or the dual cost side the purpose of this paper is to introduce a nonparametric dual method of calculating scale efficiency

investigating the cost performance of uk credit unions using radial and non radial efficiency measures abstract this paper examines the relative efficiency of uk credit unions radial and non radial measures of input cost efficiency plus associated scale efficiency measures are computed for a selection of input output specifications both measures highlighted that uk credit unions have considerable scope for efficiency gains it was mooted that the documented high levels of inefficiency may be indicative of the fact that credit unions based on clearly defined and non overlapping common bonds are not in competition with each other for market share credit unions were also highlighted as suffering from a considerable degree of scale inefficiency with the majority of scale inefficient credit unions subject to decreasing returns to scale the latter aspect highlights that the uk government s goal of larger credit unions must be accompanied by greater regulatory freedom if inefficiency is to be avoided one of the advantages of computing non radial measures is that an insight into potential over or under expenditure on specific inputs can be obtained through a comparison of the non radial measure of efficiency with the associated radial measure two interesting findings emerged the first that uk credit unions over spend on dividend payments and the second that they under spend on labour costs

equivalence and implementation of alternative methods for determining returns to scale in data envelopment analysis abstract this paper discusses alternative methods for determining returns to scale in dea the methods for estimating returns to scale in dea as developed by banker 1984 banker charnes and cooper 1984 and banker and thrall 1992 are proved to be conceptually equivalent to the two stage methods of fare grosskopf and lovell 1985 when their assumptions apply here the emphasis is on the ccr model of dea and very simple methods are introduced for determining returns to scale locally with this model by reference to banker s concept of most productive scale size

multinational operation ownership and efficiency differences in the international oil industry abstract although state involvement in market systems often leads to inefficiency this influence in the oil industry is not dwindling due to strong growth of some state oil companies based on this background there are concerns about how state firms can continue to stay relevant in the international oil industry by offsetting inefficiencies due to state control this study assesses the effects of multinational operations on the performance of oil firms this is achieved by comparing productive and scale efficiencies of state and private oil companies as well as state multinationals and private multinationals a dataset of 50 firms each year from 2001 to 2010 reveals that although multinational operation is important in reducing productive inefficiencies of state firms it does not mitigate scale inefficiencies of state owned firms state firms should therefore make multinational operations a key policy direction since this will provide a transformative agenda towards equally competing with their private counterparts however better efforts need to be paid in reducing scale inefficiencies that are pervasive among state owned oil firms providing better controls on firm size will provide better drive towards future efficient production levels

estimation of returns to scale using data envelopment analysis a comment banker 1984 introduced the idea that the sum of the intensity variables in the dea activity analysis model can be used to identify returns to scale a counterexample in chang and guh 1991 shows that banker s method may fail this prompted banker and thrall 1992 to develop an alternative approach to estimate scale efficiency using dea seemingly unaware of the work by byrnes fare and grosskopf 1984 fare grosskopf and lovell 1985 1994 and fare and grosskopf 1985 etc on the same topic their new approach is very similar to the methodology originated in these references the purpose of this comment is to make our method known and to contrast it to the banker and thrall 1992 approach

one sided elasticities and technical efficiency in multi output production a theoretical framework one of the concepts that have sparked considerable interest in the theory of production and efficiency is that of returns to scale rts economics researchers typically define rts using the notion of elasticity considerable research activity on rts has also been observed by management science researchers who utilize the methodology of data envelopment analysis dea to gain insights on rts in this paper we present a theoretical framework that integrates existing economics and management science literature on rts and provides a solid foundation for research work in this area our framework defines discusses and proposes an approach to measure input and output oriented elasticities and one sided rts we demonstrate how the work done in dea is a special case of our framework and discuss the conditions under which the resulting two left hand and the two right hand elasticities can be equal future research directions are also discussed

analysis of the residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior by incorporating multiple self selection effects abstract it is expected that the residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior might correlate with each other besides due to the existence of self selection effects the observed inter relationship between them might be the spurious result of the fact that some unobserved variables are causing both these concerns motivate us to 1 consider residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior for both in home appliances and out of home cars simultaneously and 2 explicitly control self selection effects so as to capture a relatively true effect of land use policy on household energy consumption behavior an integrated model termed as joint mixed multinomial logit multiple discrete continuous extreme value model is presented here to identify the sensitivity of household energy consumption to land use policy by considering multiple self selection effects the model results indicate that land use policy do play a great role in changing beijing residents energy consumption pattern while the self selection effects cannot be ignored when evaluating the effect of land use policy based on the policy scenario design it is found that increasing recreational facilities and bus lines in the neighborhood can greatly promote household s energy saving behavior additionally the importance of soft policy and package policy is also emphasized in the context of beijing

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

on the casual relationship between government expenditures and national income a research strategy is suggested that separates the issue of inference from the problems of prediction or of quantitative policy analysis of an empirical parametric model and illustrates a new methodology that enables this in a test for prima facie causality unlike the conventional parametric test the more powerful multiple rank f test is invariant to monotonic transformations of the variables and independent of the error distribution employing this test the wagnerian hypothesis supported by conventional parametric analysis is rejected and the conventional keynesian theory is accepted copyright 1990 by mit press

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

the structure of technical efficiency it is common practice to decompose measures of efficiency into component measures of technical and allocative efficiency in this paper we show how and why to decompose a general measure of technical efficiency into component measures of purely technical efficiency congestion and scale efficiency and we investigate the properties of each measure we do so for a multiple output technology which satisfies a weak axiom system that does not include either constant returns to scale or strong input disposability

a re examination of the relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth in malaysia abstract the purpose of this study is to re investigate the relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth in malaysia from 1972 1 to 2003 4 this study adopted the newly developed ecm based f test kanioura a turner p 2005 critical values for an f test for cointegration in the multivariate model applied economics 37 3 265 270 for cointegration to examine the presence of long run equilibrium relationship through the autoregressive distributed lag ardl model the empirical evidence suggests that electricity consumption and economic growth are not cointegrated in malaysia however the standard granger s test and mwald test suggest that electricity consumption and economic growth in malaysia granger causes each other this finding provides policymakers with a better understanding of electricity consumption and allows them to formulate electricity consumption policy to support the economic development and to enhance the productivity of capital labour and other factors of production for future economic growth in malaysia

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

board structure and firm technical efficiency evidence from canadian state owned enterprises abstract the objective of the study is to analyze the board performance relationship for a group of 14 canadian soes this context is unique because soes do not have major control devices other than the board as the interaction effect if any between the board and other corporate governance structures is expected to be low we do not have to fully control for the potential impact of different control devices or to disentangle them completely from influencing board composition the performance is also measured using data envelopment analysis dea a linear programming method used for the first time in this research area as such this study contributes to the operational research literature while applying dea method to untraditional fields of research the results from the multivariate analysis suggest that board size and board independence are positively related to firm technical efficiency only when soes are exposed to market discipline in other words product market competition is a precondition for boards to be effective

the power of cointegration tests versus data frequency and time spans 1 introduction in the empirical literature of cointegration analysis researchers often face the limitation of using relatively short time spans of data in many cases this is simply due to the absence of longer spans of data in other cases some equilibrium relationships have to be studied for certain time periods for instance when the models require a flexible exchange rate or a variable price of gold studies have to be undertaken for the flexible exchange rate period starting from the early 1970s or for the period since 1968 when the price of gold was allowed to fluctuate with the limits of relatively short time spans many researchers chose to use relatively high frequency data to conduct the studies such attempts have been criticized in the literature hakkio and rush 1991 argue that the frequency of observation plays a very minor role p 572 in exploring a cointegration relationship because cointegration is a long run property and thus we often need long spans of data to properly test it p 579 hakkio and rush s point is similar to the one made by shiller and perron 1985 that the length of the time series is far more important than the frequency of observation when testing for unit roots while those who criticize the collection of high frequency data to deal with the short time span problem advocate the use of long spans of data to test properly for cointegration their suggestion is sometimes misinterpreted as a support for using a small number of annual data for instance bahmani oskooee 1996 p 481 borrows hakkio and rush s 1991 p 572 testing a long run property of the data with 120 monthly observations is no different than testing it with ten annual observations to defend his use of annual data by saying that using annual data of over 30 years is as good as using quarterly or monthly data over the same period taylor 1995 p 112 claims that the deficiency of using less than 50 annual observations should be compensated by the fact that the data set spans nearly half a century i would like to point out that hakkio and rush s study has several limitations and therefore it may not be appropriate to cite the conclusions of the study for the cases beyond its limitations their study only allows the cointegrating residual to be a pure first order autoregressive arc 1 process and is limited to the single equation method of cointegration tests they show the results only for some extreme cases where the cointegrating residual for the monthly data is either very highly serially correlated nearly nonstationary and thus all the cointegration tests would have very low test power regardless of the frequency of the data or with a quite low coefficient of serial correlation thus all the cointegration tests can easily reject the null of no cointegration regardless of the frequency of the data the present paper is motivated by seeking the answers to the following questions i does the frequency of observation play a very minor role in exploring a cointegration relationship in the cases where the cointegrating residual is not nearly nonstationary ii can the validity of the conclusions of hakkio and rush 1991 based on a single equation method be extended to other popular cointegration tests and to more realistic cases where the models with higher lag orders are required when the cointegrating residual is generated with more noise than a pure first order autoregressive process iii while testing cointegration with 120 monthly observations could be no different than testing it with 10 annual observations as both cases are subject to very low test power does this warrant that using annual data of 30 to 40 years is as good as using quarterly or monthly data over the same period iv how serious would the problem of size distortion be for the use of a small number of annual observations this paper examines the power of cointegration tests versus frequency of observation and time spans as well as the small sample size distortions of the tests through the monte carlo experiments

computing economies of vertical integration economies of scope and economies of scale using partial frontier nonparametric methods abstract so far in the nonparametric literature only full frontier nonparametric methods have been applied to search for economies of scope and scale particularly the data envelopment analysis method dea however these methods present some drawbacks that might lead to biased results this paper proposes a methodology based on more robust partial frontier nonparametric methods to look for scope and scale economies through this methodology it is possible to assess the robustness of these economies and in particular to assess the influence that extreme data or outliers might have on them the influence of the imposition of convexity on the production set of firms was also investigated this methodology was applied to the water utilities that operated in portugal between 2002 and 2008 there is evidence of economies of vertical integration and economies of scale in drinking water supply utilities and in water and wastewater utilities operating mainly in the retail segment economies of scale were found in water and wastewater utilities operating exclusively in the wholesale and in some of these utilities diseconomies of scope were also found the proposed methodology also allowed us to conclude that the existence of some smaller utilities makes the minimum optimal scales go down

clean energy non clean energy and economic growth in the mist countries abstract this paper explores the causal relationship between clean renewable nuclear and non clean energy consumption and economic growth in emerging economies of the mist mexico indonesia south korea and turkey countries the panel co integration tests reveal that there is a long term equilibrium relationship among gdp capital formation labor force renewable nuclear and fossil fuel energy consumption the panel causality results indicate that 1 there is a positive unidirectional short run causality from fossil fuel energy consumption to economic growth with a bidirectional long run causality 2 there is a unidirectional long run causality from renewable energy consumption to economic growth with positive bidirectional short run causality and a long run causality from renewable to fossil fuel energy consumption with negative short run feedback effects and 3 there is a bidirectional long run causality between nuclear energy consumption and economic growth and a long run causality from fossil fuel energy consumption to nuclear energy consumption with positive short run feedback effects these suggest that mist countries should be energy dependent economies and that energy conservation policies may depress their economic development however developing renewable and nuclear energy is a viable solution for addressing energy security and climate change issues and creating clean and fossil fuel energy partnerships could enhance a sustainable energy economy

household biomass energy choice and its policy implications on improving rural livelihoods in sichuan china abstract it is widely known that a switch from traditional biomass energy to modern clean safe and efficient energy could improve local rural livelihoods by enhancing the access to high quality energy and reducing the negative impacts of traditional biomass energy on health environment and living standards hence in this paper we used alternative specific conditional logit model asclm to examine the rural household energy choice behaviors in sichuan province of china from the perspective of revealed and stated preferences the results show that the fuel switching in our study region is not a simple unidirectional process from traditional biomass energy to modern fuels as incomes improve household energy choice behaviors could be not only affected by energy specific characteristics such as fuel price smoky level and safety risk but also influenced by household specific factors such as income level age and educational level of the decision maker household demographic structure number of people frequently eating at home distance to the nearest biomass collecting spot and household location suggesting that government should attach more importance to simultaneously improve energy quality control energy price and enhance household socio economic status

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

housing choice hindrances and urban spatial structure evidence from matched location and location preference data in chinese cities abstract in a monocentric city with a well functioning residential market pareto efficient spatial equilibrium entails the sorting of residents according to their bid rent gradient in descending order away from city center violation of this sorting condition creates opportunities for pareto improving trading of locations and can be sustained only if the market is hindered we propose a simple ordered location choice model using matched location and location preference data of individual households to examine violations of the pareto efficient spatial sorting condition in so doing we are able to identify population groups facing housing choice hindrances we find in a sample of chinese cities undergoing housing market liberalization that poor marketability of the previously state provided homes inadequate provision of housing finance and spatial mismatch between job market and housing market opportunities contribute to a pareto inefficient spatial structure

determinants of private savings behaviour in turkey this study investigates the effects on private saving rates of a number of policy and non policy variables the analysis covers the period 1968 1994 the empirical private saving model for turkey is estimated the findings support the hypothesis that private saving rates have strong inertia the evidence indicates that government saving does not tend to crowd out private savings and the ricardian equivalence does not hold strictly income level has a positive impact on private saving rate and growth rate of income is not statistically significant from a policy point of view financial depth and development measures in turkey suggest that countries with deeper financial systems tend to have higher private saving rates private credit and real interest rates try to capture the severity of the borrowing constraints and the degree of financial repression for turkey moreover the negative impact of life expectancy rate lends support to the life cycle hypothesis the precautionary motive for saving is suppor

are saving and investment cointegrated the case of malaysia 1965 2003 this article examines whether domestic saving rate leads to higher domestic investment rate in the case of malaysia we argue that the results obtained from cross sectional studies are not able to address this issue satisfactorily and highlight the importance of individual country case studies using the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing procedure the results reveal a robust cointegrated relationship between domestic saving and investment rates during the period 1965 to 2003

price and income elasticities of disaggregated import demand results from uecms and an application this paper presents an empirical analysis of the demand for maize milk powder butter and rice imports in cyprus using annual time series data covering the period 1975 1994 none of these products is produced in cyprus and all the necessary quantities are imported to meet domestic demand the primary objective of the paper is to derive long run price and income elasticities of import demand that can be used to analyse the impact of various policies such as the adoption of the common agricultural policy cap when and if the republic of cyprus joins the european union eu in so doing the paper takes on board some recent developments in time series econometrics the cointegration test used the bounds test is a recent test and is based on the estimation of an unrestricted error correction model uecm parsimonious models were derived using hendry s general to specific approach the estimated elasticities were subsequently used to quantify some of the implications for cyprus had the cap been ope

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

property rights in a fishery regulatory change and firm performance a new method is introduced and applied to the british columbia halibut fishery to analyze changes in productivity of firms harvesting a natural capital stock the index number technique decomposes the contributions of output prices variable input prices fixed inputs and productivity to firm profits adjusted for changes in the natural capital stock an application of the method is given using micro level data from a common pool resource the indexes provide a ready made comparison of all firms to the most profitable firm per unit of resource stock benchmarking with the decompositions also allows firms and regulators to improve overall industry performance by allowing them to analyze what components are contributing most to relative economic profits

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

dea duality on returns to scale rts in production and cost analyses an occurrence of multiple solutions and differences between production based and cost based rts estimates this article discusses the concept of rts returns to scale in the framework of dea data envelopment analysis production and cost analyses focusing on an occurrence of multiple solutions and how to deal with such a difficulty dual relationships between production based and cost based rts estimates are also theoretically discussed in this study

an analysis of the interaction among savings investments and growth in turkey turkey has been implementing tight fiscal and monetary policies for years these policies rely on the basic understanding that savings trigger growth and investments however there are alternative theoretical discussions and empirical findings related to the interaction among these variables in this study while one of the purposes is to analyse the interaction among these variables for the turkish case the other is to try to bring an insight for other developing countries for the issues such as data production econometric analysis and as well as making policy suggestions in line with the evidence from the turkish case the findings of this study show that it is the growth that induces both savings and investments hence it is necessary to question policies that assume it is the savings triggering growth and investments

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

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

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

best practice technology in an adverse environment the case of indian sugar 1981 1986 abstract empirical production frontiers are sometimes observed to shift downward over certain periods of time associating higher quantities of input with lower quantities of output this phenomenon is quite different than an increase in observed inefficiency relative to best practice we find such a shift for the indian vacuum pan sugar industry and identify its cause as environmental adversity reducing the performance of best practice technology specifically agro climatic difficulties exacerbated by regulation induced rigidities provide the adverse environment the case serves as a context for a re examination of the concepts of best practice technology and technological regress

static efficiency decompositions and capacity utilisation integrating economic and technical capacity notions starting from existing static decompositions of overall economic efficiency on nonparametric production and cost frontiers this article proposes more comprehensive decompositions including several cost based notions of capacity utilization furthermore in case prices are lacking we develop additional decompositions of overall technical efficiency integrating a technical concept of capacity utilization these new efficiency decompositions provide a link between short and long run economic analysis and in empirical work avoid conflating inefficiency and differences in capacity utilization an empirical analysis using a monthly panel of chilean hydro electric power plants illustrates the potential of these decomposition proposals

the impact of budget deficits on national saving in the usa this paper analyses the effect of government budget deficits on national saving in the usa utilizing annual time series data from 1967 to 1996 a model that includes budget deficits money supply real exchange rate real interest rate and the proportion of working age population to total population to explain national saving is developed after examining the time series properties of the data an error correction model is estimated the overall results suggest that an increase in government budget deficits tend to reduce national saving the working age population coming out of the baby boom generation has positively contributed to an increase in national saving

autoregressive modelling and money income causality detection abstract a step wise procedure based on granger s concept of causality and abaike s final prediction error criterion is suggested as a practical means to identify the order of lags of each variable in a multivariate autoregressive process the model seems useful because it can serve as a reduced form formulation to avoid imposing often spurious or false restrictions of the model it also provides a reasonably powerful test of causality the idea is applied to u s postwar money and income data it is found that between m1 and gnp a bivariate feedback model fits the data best between m2 and gnp a one way causal model from money to income performs better diagnostic checks applied to our model seem to indicate the adequacy of our approach

analyzing components of productivity growth using the bennet lowe indicator an application to welsh sheep farms this article introduces the bennet lowe total factor productivity tfp indicator the proposed measure is difference based additively complete and transitive we also develop a general nonparametric framework to exhaustively decompose all bennet type tfp indicators including the one introduced here into technical change technical efficiency change scale efficiency change and mix efficiency change this decomposition provides a powerful tool for policy makers to guide financial decisions on research and development extension subsidies and price support the empirical application focuses on the welsh sheep sector for the years 2001 2014 the results show that in this 14 year period welsh sheep farms increased their tfp by 30 28 on average 2 33 p a however the exhaustive decomposition shows that tfp growth is not distributed equally across all farms with an increasing divergence between front runners and laggards the negative values of scale efficiency change and mix efficiency change cast doubt on the current subsidy policies

a dea model to evaluate car efficiency this paper evaluates the efficiency of personal cars by using the non parametric data envelopment analysis dea approach analysis and comparison is performed in a normative manner since all the economic and technical parameters used four and ten respectively are not explicitly weighted the data set covers 121 different car models in 1997 as appeared in the german auto motor und sport magazine

a bibliometric review energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the residential sector residential sector has been one key sector for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions due to its significant contribution to global warming researchers in different countries have studied household energy consumption patterns and greenhouse gas emissions in order to promote low carbon lifestyles however few review papers have been published in this regard leading to a lack of systematic understanding on the related research achievements hence by using a bibliometric approach this paper aims to review the existing literature and examine the evolution of such a field so that the research trends can be uncovered including popular research methods citation analysis is performed to assess the influence of most productive journals countries territories and authors network analysis is also conducted to evaluate the relationship among different countries territories authors and keywords research outcomes of this paper present a comprehensive research picture on residential energy consumption and corresponding greenhouse gas emissions ree related papers published from 1997 to 2016 the most productive journals countries territories authors are also analyzed based on citation analysis and network analysis in addition results also revealed that behavioral analysis input output analysis life cycle assessment and cost benefit analysis are the most commonly used methods in this field results obtained from this study can provide valuable information for researchers interested in the ree related field

cost effectiveness measures on convex and nonconvex technologies abstract camanho and dyson 2005 extended shephard s 1974 revenue indirect cost efficiency approach to a cost effectiveness framework which helps to assess the ability of a firm to achieve the current revenue expressed in the firm s own prices and quantities at minimum cost the degree of cost effectiveness is quantified as the ratio of the minimum cost to the observed cost of the evaluated firm where the minimum cost is computed by simultaneously adjusting the output levels at the current revenue in this paper we develop two cost effectiveness approaches based on convex data envelopment analysis and nonconvex free disposable hull technologies the objectives of this paper are threefold firstly we develop a convex cost effectiveness cce measure which is equivalent to the camanho dyson cce measure under the constant returns to scale assumption secondly we introduce three nonconvex cost effectiveness ncce measures which are shown to be equivalent with respect to each returns to scale nonconvex technology finally we apply our framework to a real data

the determinants of household and private savings in thailand a broad set of possible determinants of household and private savings behaviour is examined through an in depth case study of thailand during the period 1960 to 2004 results suggest that an increase in economic growth inflation and terms of trade all have a significant positive impact on household and private saving rates in contrast the availability of bank credit tends to reduce household and private saving rates while an increase in both old and young dependency has a negative impact on household and private saving rates the magnitude of the impact on the former is far greater than that on the latter furthermore public saving seems to crowd out household and private saving but less than proportionately this reflects a possible role of fiscal policy in increasing national savings in the economy over and above these variables corporate saving is another important determinant of household saving an increase in the former brings about a significant reduction in the latter

an aggregate private expenditure function for the bangladesh economy abstract this paper specifies and estimates an aggregate private expenditure function for bangladesh for the period 1974 1 1985 4 it is specified on the basis of a monetary approach where the level of private expenditure depends not only on the level of real permanent disposable income but also on a variable which measures the extent of disequilibrium in the real money market the regression results suggest that the long run income elasticity of private expenditure is around 0 765 which is lower than unity a fact which induces a decline in the ratio of private expenditure to income as income increases the adjustment coefficient to monetary disequilibrium indicates that in the long run around 32 of excess money supply is reflected in an increase in private expenditure while the rest is mainly used for accumulation of assets

an econometric model of health care utilization and health insurance in switzerland abstract this paper presents a preliminary econometric analysis on how different alternative plans affect the utilization of health care services in switzerland the data come from the 1992 1993 swiss health survey shs we briefly describe some institutional aspects of the swiss health system which prevailed at the time of the shs with particular emphasis on health insurance plans and payment system of providers we estimate a simultaneous two equation model containing latent variables in order to compare the probability of having at least one inpatient stay given that the insured has used some medical treatment for those who have purchased only a basic insurance plan and those who have purchased a supplemental insurance

congestion and returns to scale in data envelopment analysis congestion indicates an economic state where inputs are overly invested evidence of congestion occurs whenever reducing some inputs can increase outputs return to scale is another related important economic implication of dea efficiencies in this research we discuss together the problems of congestion constant return to scale increasing return to scale and decreasing return to scale by output oriented dea models c2r model bc2 model fg model st model and a modified model we identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the evidence of congestion constant increasing and decreasing returns to scale we show the exclusive relationships between the concepts of congestion and returns to scale numerical examples are provided for illustration

environmentally sustainable household consumption from aggregate environmental pressures to priority fields of action unsustainable consumption patterns of the north or rather of the global affluent consumers class have been identified by agenda 21 as one of the key driving forces behind the unsustainable development however neither accounting based on the system of national accounts sna nor household economics provide the proper instruments to assess the environmental impact of household decision making eco efficiency assessments as familiar in the business sector provide no appropriate tool for households as an alternative an environmental space based assessment scheme is suggested covering the major pressures on the environment caused by household decisions the methodology is used twice once to analyse the environmental relevance of the main activity clusters of household consumption and once to identify the dominant acts of consumption within each cluster the latter provide the basis for deriving environmental performance indicators a rough analysis of household influence potentials permits to identify housing eating and mobility as the three priority fields for action for minimising the environmental impact of households extending the influence analysis actor matrixes are derived allocating influence and thus responsibility for environmental pressures to different groups of economic agents

a nonparametric approach to expenditure constrained profit maximization a nonparametric approach to expenditure constrained profit maximization is developed a deterministic frontier profit function is constructed with and without expenditure constraints foregone profit is used as dual evidence for the existence of expenditure constraints individual evaluations on performance and expenditure constraints are produced empirical analysis is based on survey data for california rice farms seventeen of the eighty two surveyed farms experience profit loss as a result of expenditure constraints

economies of diversification in the banking industry abstract this paper defines a new measure economies of diversification to examine the cost effect of product line expansion this measure is a special case of expansion path subadditivity and contains economies of scope as a special case a nonparametric frontier technique which isolates the effects of inefficiency and scale is used to measure economies of diversification applied to a set of 468 u s depository institutions operating in 1984 we find slight diseconomies of diversification diseconomies of diversification and inefficiency due to the overutilization of resources are found to be more important determinants of bank costs than is the failure to operate at optimal scale

construction of all dea efficient surfaces of the production possibility set under the generalized data envelopment analysis model abstract in this paper we study the structural properties of dea efficient surfaces of the production possibility set under the generalized data envelopment analysis gdea model introduced by yu wei and brockett 1996 the gdea model contains the following well known data envelopment analysis dea models as its special cases the ccr model by charnes cooper and rhodes 1978 the bcc model by banker charnes and cooper 1984 the fg model by fare and grosskopf 1985 and the st model by seiford and thrall 1990 the relationships among decision making units dmus can be found by solving the gdea model with predilection cone description using these relations to identify relative positions of the dmus on the dea efficient surface we devise an efficient algorithm for constructing all the dea efficient surfaces through further analysis we show properties of dea efficient surfaces under several important subclasses of dea models analytical expressions for the dea efficient surfaces are obtained which are useful in analyzing the structure of dea efficiencies and in strategic group classifications results from this paper suggest important applications in constructing pareto solutions or nondominated solutions and in analyzing structural properties of pareto solutions in multiobjective programming

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

the relation between savings and growth cointegration and causality evidence from asia the direction of causality between savings and growth remains unclear even though it is of critical importance for development policy in this paper granger causality analysis is undertaken for seven asian countries using the vecm engle and granger and var procedures we find that in most cases the direction of causality runs primarily from growth or income to savings although in some countries there is also evidence of a feedback effect from savings to income and growth thus development policy should focus less on promoting high savings rates and more on promoting high growth rates estimation of the savings functions are presented using engle and granger s static ols and stock and watson s dynamic ols dols procedures where appropriate the high savings rates in asia are found to be due to the high rate of growth of income per capita declining shares of dependent population and some special institutional features such as the high central provident fund rates in singapore interest rates ar

slack adjusted dea for time series analysis performance measurement of japanese electric power generation industry in 1984 1993 abstract using a new slack adjusted data envelopment analysis sa dea model which explicitly incorporates an influence of slacks into its efficiency measurement this study discusses a use of various efficiencies and index measures for dea dynamic analysis an analytical formulation to determine the type of return to scale rts is proposed for the new dea model this paper mathematically discusses when multiple solutions occur on rts and how to deal with such a difficulty as an important case study this paper applies the proposed dea approach to examine the performance of japanese electric power generation companies from 1984 to 1993 two policy implications are suggested for guiding the japanese electric power industry

municipal solid waste recycling market and the european 2020 horizon strategy a regional efficiency analysis in spain abstract this paper focuses on the analysis of the efficiency of spanish regions in the development of the recycling market in their respective territories through the use of a novel data envelopment analysis method with multiple outputs the efficiency analysis takes into account the mandatory goals of reducing mixed collected municipal solid waste and the augmentation of selective collection of recyclable materials as set by the european union and the spanish legal framework this issue is highly relevant since neither of these two management goals may be achieved without the recycling market and its associated industry having been previously developed to a sufficient level results confirm that catalonia navarre and madrid function as benchmark regions to be emulated by the remaining inefficient regions the necessary regional investments and output projections to reach an efficient development of the recycling sector are also estimated additionally it is found that per capita income and population density significantly explain differences in regional efficiencies finally taking efficient regions as benchmarks to learn from some policy recommendations are offered

determinants of household saving in the g 7 countries recent evidence this paper employs data from the last four decades to analyse major determinants of household saving for the group of seven g 7 nations particular attention is paid to the effects of interest rates government saving and social security contributions regression analysis is used to control for the effects of both the level and changes in income per capita and inflation

the savings growth nexus for the malaysian economy a view through rolling sub samples the purpose of this study is to re investigate the savings growth nexus for the malaysian economy using bounds testing approach to cointegration and toda and yamamoto 1995 and dolado and lutkepohl 1996 tydl granger causality test this study covered the sample period from 1971 q1 to 2008 q4 the cointegration results suggest that the variables are moving together in the long run and the tydl granger causality results indicate that the relationship between savings and economic growth is bilateral in addition the rolling sub samples tydl granger causality test exhibited a relatively stable causal relationship running from savings to economic growth in malaysia particularly before the onset of asian financial crisis in 1997 1998

energy saving behaviours development of a practice based model financial pressure and concern for the environment has meant many consumers are aware of the need to reduce their consumption of many resources including energy which is the focus of the present study while potential energy use deterrents in the form of access constraints and price increases are forms of extrinsic control it is not clear how effective these are at reducing consumption and indeed it is not clear if such measures are consistent with people s underlying energy saving motivations beyond behavioural motivations people s desires to reduce energy can be thwarted barriers and or supported by a variety of factors some within their control while others are perhaps less so using a practice based framework and a qualitative focus group approach this study presents an exploratory study of these issues policy suggestions for overcoming barriers as well suggestions as to how energy saving behaviours can be supported are offered

downsizing in the german chemical manufacturing industry during the 1990s why is small beautiful the german chemical manufacturing industry experienced major downsizing between 1992 and 2004 with the average size of firms shrinking by nearly half during this period this study uses modern frontier efficiency analysis to investigate the determinants of this downsizing based on reliable census data the results of this analysis suggest that firms were not primarily concerned with improving technical efficiency but with establishing an optimal scale of production the proportion of scale efficient firms has been persistently increasing and downsizing is found to be a rational conduct because all scale inefficient firms have continually operated under the decreasing returns portion of technology

returns to scale in convex production technologies the notion of returns to scale rts is well established in data envelopment analysis dea in the variable returns to scale production technology the rts characterization is closely related to other scale characteristics such as the scale elasticity most productive scale size mpss and global rts types indicative of the direction to mpss in recent years a number of alternative production technologies have been developed in the dea literature most of these technologies are polyhedral and hence are closed and convex sets examples include technologies with weakly disposable undesirable outputs models with weight restrictions and production trade offs technologies that include several component production processes and network dea models for most of these technologies the relationship between rts and other scale characteristics has remained unexplored the theoretical results obtained in this paper establish such relationships for a very large class of closed convex technologies of which polyhedral technologies are an important example

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

the relation of farm size and government programme benefits an application of data envelopment analysis to policy evaluation data envelopment analysis is used to establish comparisions of maximum profit without and with participation in government progarammes a measure of a farm s ability to survive returns on equity is used to measure the benefit received from participation in government programmes density functions are estimated with kernel density estimation using bootstrap samples and weighted regressions are used to test density estimation using bootstrap samples and weighted regressions are used to test the equality of mean benefits between different size groups the results indicate that almost all farms that could be considered of commercial size receive the same benefit from participation in government programmes

the measurement of productive efficiency a reconsideration the purpose of this paper is to generalize the farrell indexes of productive efficiency to nonhomothetic production technologies and at the same time maintain the cost interpretation of the farrell measures since the generalized indexes rely heavily on recent developments in the estimation of frontier cost and production functions several frontier models are reviewed in addition to generalized indexes of technical allocative and overall productive efficiency a variety of single factor efficiency measures are discussed the applicability of the proposed efficiency measures is illustrated with a numerical example of electric power generation

the role of the reference technology in measuring productive efficiency after a twenty year lull the measurement of productive efficiency is enjoying a revival in particular the index of efficiency developed by debreu i95i and later utilised by farrell i957 has received considerable attention these measures have been used fairly extensively in empirical work in both the operations research and economic literature these types of indexes have also appeared in the growing literature on testing for regularity conditions in production e g in afriat i972 diewert and parkan i983 and varian 1984 since the farrell type measure is the focus in this paper a brief review is useful in the farrell framework overall efficiency oe can be decomposed into two multiplicative components allocative efficiency ae and technical efficiency te

a variable returns to scale data envelopment analysis model for the joint determination of efficiencies with an example of the uk health service a multi activity dea model for the joint determination of efficiencies with variable returns to scale is developed in this paper the model contains an element of complexity that is not present in the previous dea models for estimating returns to scale it is found that apparent overall efficiency may hide scale inefficiency in individual activities the model is applied to study the performance of individual specialties of national health services trusts in the uk it is argued that efficiency can be defined from two different perspectives either as the most efficient internal allocation of resources or the most efficient overall allocation of resources this distinction becomes important when looking at the efficiency of parts of inefficient dmus the relationship between size and returns to scale is also explored this method allows the determination of optimal size of an activity

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

energy use and appliance ownership in ireland abstract this paper examines household energy use and appliance ownership in ireland logit regression analyses on a large micro dataset reveal how household characteristics can help explain the ownership of energy using appliances using ols regression models we explore the factors affecting residential energy demand conditional on appliance ownership results suggest that the methods of space and water heating employed by a household are even more important than electrical appliances in explaining domestic energy usage however the stock of appliances must be included in such models so that results will not be biased the methods employed in this paper can be easily adopted for studies of household energy use in other countries where household expenditure survey data are available

dea models for resource reallocation and production input output estimation abstract this paper discusses the inverse data envelopment analysis dea problem with preference cone constraints an inverse dea model can be used for a decision making unit dmu to estimate its input output levels when some or all of its input output entities are revised given its current dea efficiency level the extension of introducing additional preference cones to the previously developed inverse dea model allows the decision makers to incorporate their preferences or important policies over inputs outputs into the production analysis and resource allocation process we provide the properties of the inverse dea problem through a discussion of its related multi objective and weighted sum single objective programming problems numerical examples are presented to illustrate the application procedure of our extended inverse dea model in particular we demonstrate how to apply the model to the case of a local home electrical appliance group company for its resource reallocation decisions

cart before the horse the saving growth nexus in mexico abstract using recent developments in econometric techniques we show that the conventionally accepted view that higher saving rate causes higher economic growth does not hold for mexico in fact the causality goes in the opposite direction

representing in home and out of home energy consumption behavior in beijing abstract it is expected that in home and out of home energy consumption behavior in a household might be correlated with each other probably due to the existence of household budget constraints ownership and usage of energy saving technologies for in home appliances or vehicles might lead to the increase in out of home or in home energy consumption it is therefore necessary to jointly represent in home and out of home energy consumption in the same modeling framework with this consideration we first build a new type of energy consumption model based on the multiple discrete continuous extreme value mdcev modeling framework next we conducted a questionnaire survey in beijing in 2009 and successfully collected the information about households energy consumption ownership usage of in home appliances and vehicles and households and their members attributes from 1014 households throughout an empirical analysis it is confirmed that the mdcev model is effective to simultaneously describe the in home and out of home energy consumption behavior in addition it is revealed that a set of household and personal attributes affect the ownership and usage of in home appliances and vehicles furthermore it is shown that the unobserved factors play a much more important role in explaining energy consumption behavior than the observed attributes of households and their members

understanding the spectrum of residential energy consumption a quantile regression approach abstract residential energy consumption accounts for 22 of the total energy consumption in the us however the impacts of local planning policies such as increasing density and changing the housing type mix on residential energy consumption are not well understood using residential energy consumption survey data from the energy information administration quantile regression analysis was used to tease out the effects of various factors on entire distribution on the energy consumption spectrum instead of focusing on the conditional average results show that while housing size matters for space conditioning housing type has a more nuanced impact self reported neighborhood density does not seem to have any impact on energy use furthermore the effects of these factors at the tails of the energy use distribution are substantially different than the average in some cases differing by a factor of six some not all types of multifamily housing offer almost as much savings as reduction in housing area by 100 m 2 compared to single family houses