multi directional efficiency analysis of efficiency patterns in chinese banks 1997 2008 dea type efficiency studies are often used to investigate levels of efficiencies differences in those levels between subgroups within a data set and possible determinants of such differences in the current paper we show how differences in the efficiency patterns between different subgroups within a data set can be investigated using the more recent mea methodology we specifically look at the case of joint stock banks and state owned banks in china and are able to empirically test hypotheses of whether there are differences not only in the levels but also in the patterns of inefficiencies between the two types of banks that is which variables the inefficiencies are located on we argue that certain differences are expected based on differences in objectives and constraints in the two types of banks and find empirical support for most of those expected patterns

nonfundamental speculation revisited we show that a linear pure strategy equilibrium may not exist in the model of madrigal 1996 contrary to the claim of the original paper this is because madrigal s characterization of a pure strategy equilibrium omits a second order condition if the nonfundamental speculator s information about noise trading is sufficiently precise a linear pure strategy equilibrium fails to exist in parameter regions where a pure strategy equilibrium does exist we identify a few calculation errors in madrigal 1996 that result in misleading implications

does liberalization reduce agency costs evidence from the indian banking sector abstract on february 16 2002 the reserve bank of india issued a circular that signaled a policy liberalization facilitating acquisition of private sector banks in india by foreign entities portfolios of private sector and nationalized banks posted significant value gains in the days surrounding the announcement the gains by private sector banks were almost double those of nationalized banks we further analyze the firm specific abnormal returns using cross sectional regressions and find a significant relation between firm specific abnormal returns and factors typically associated with a bank s potential for takeover these results provide the first empirical support for stulz s hypothesis that one cause of the valuation gains associated with liberalization is the expected gain from a reduction of agency costs

technical quality and environmental efficiency of the olive oil industry abstract this paper studies the level of technical efficiency in the olive oil industry from a multi output perspective and examines olive oil production in quantitative and qualitative terms the study also covers the environmental impact of the production process these are key issues due to the current environmental organoleptic and food traceability requirements of the eu common agricultural policy cap furthermore product differentiation is sought after in today s ever more demanding markets the production of olive oil in andalusia spain is the most important agricultural food industry in the whole region and it represents 30 of world olive oil production three data sources have been used a comprehensive survey to a sample of olive oil producers their financial reports and the opinion of a group of experts in olive oil production techniques interviewed by means of the delphi survey with this data and after the construction of indicators a production frontier is elaborated by applying an extension of the data envelopment analysis dea technique this will allow for the measuring of the relative technical efficiency indices and set specific efficiency indices for both the quality of the oil produced and the environmental impact of the production process those factors impacting on efficiency are determined by a truncated regression model with bootstrap the results show a medium high level of relative technical efficiency and highlight the importance of efficiency factors involving production and marketing associations

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

new approach for the assignment of new european agricultural subsidies using scores from data envelopment analysis application to olive growing farms in andalusia spain abstract more than 60 of olive growing farms in andalusia spain would have negative returns without european agricultural subsidies agenda 2000 criteria imply that agricultural subsidies currently play the role of enhancing the production quality and the environmental and social values of agriculture although the necessity of the modulation of subsidies is stated the eu regulations do not state which objective criteria should be used or how they should be measured despite the fact that regulations demand objectivity in this measurement this paper proposes an allocation system for subsidies which takes the agenda 2000 criteria into account through their assignment according to farm efficiency which is calculated by decomposing overall dea scores by means of internalizing the positive and negative externalities of agricultural activity the paper analyzes the type efficiency of the andalusian olive growing sector by using the proposed indexes over a sample of 3000 real farms taken from the administrative subsidy database

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 wealth effects of deregulation of canadian financial institutions abstract canada like other industrial countries recently introduced various financial reforms to remove the barriers separating the operations and ownership of banks from non bank financial institutions this study analyzes the wealth effects of the reforms on the banks and non bank financial institutions and the changes in their systematic risk resulting from financial deregulation over the period 1984 to 1991 the results indicate that while there was a significant cumulative gain for the insurance industry unlike a number of u s studies there was no evidence of wealth transfer among the institutions during the period of deregulation of the canadian financial system additional tests indicate that although the regulatory changes did not have a significant effect on the risk of the banks the systematic risk of the non bank financial institutions increased significantly during the period of regulatory reforms

effect of public subsidies on farm technical efficiency a meta analysis of empirical results abstractinvestigating the impact of public subsidies on farm technical efficiency is becoming a critical issue in applied agricultural policy analysis this article presents a meta analysis of empirical results on this issue based on data gathered from a systematic literature review we find that in the empirical literature subsidies are commonly negatively associated with farm technical efficiency meta regression estimation results show that the direction significantly negative significantly positive or non significant of the observed effects is sensitive to the way subsidies are modelled in the empirical studies

measuring the impacts of production risk on technical efficiency a state contingent conditional order m approach this article studies the influence of risk on farms technical efficiency levels the analysis extends the order m efficiency scores approach proposed by daraio and simar 2005 to the state contingent framework the empirical application focuses on cross section data of catalan specialized crop farms from the year 2011 results suggest that accounting for production risks increases the technical performance a 10 increase in output risk will result in a 2 5 increase in average firm technical performance 2014 elsevier b v all rights reserved

changes in interstate banking laws the impact on shareholder wealth this study examines the impact on shareholder wealth of changes in interstate banking laws the research demonstrates that changes in state statutes which allow interstate banking have a positive impact on the stock prices of regional banking organizations and a negative impact on the stock prices of money center banks interstate banking statutes initially exclude those states in which the money center banks are headquartered the findings provide evidence that by excluding money center banks from expansion across state lines the competition from the regional banks may have an adverse competitive effect on the money center banks from june 1982 to september 1986 44 states and the district of columbia passed some form of interstate banking legislation this study measures the impact of these legislative changes on the wealth of bank shareholders when legislation is enacted each state s banks are given the opportunity to engage in interstate merger activity the market s perception of the impact on the affected banks should be reflected in the equity returns of shareholders the results show that while there are no announcement effects for the entire sample there are significant effects among a subsample of the data set money center banks experience negative returns throughout the sample period whereas regional banking organizations experience positive abnormal returns section i reviews the literature section ii describes the data used in this study and defines the event the methodological issues are addressed in section iii the empirical results are in section iv the conclusions are in section v

adjustment costs in the technical efficiency an application to global banking this paper proposes a new framework of measuring technical efficiency that takes into account adjustment costs in variable inputs associated with changes in efficiency we look closely at the implicit assumption in any model of technical efficiency that inputs could freely adjust yet the technical efficiency is determined from the allocation of inputs by the firm to production on the one hand and to efficiency on the other we show that technical efficiency depends on adjustment costs in variable inputs estimating the proposed model has certain complexities that we overcome by employing a non parametric local linear maximum likelihood llml in the empirical section we employ a comprehensive global banking sample and estimate bank alternative profit efficiency across a plethora of countries with strong variability in the underlying adjustment costs moreover given the observed heterogeneity across countries evidence shows that adjustment costs due to personnel expenses are the highest among advanced countries emerging economies show strong potential in terms of efficiency post financial crisis mainly due to lower labor adjustment costs alas our findings show some persistence in adjustment costs post the financial crisis

optimal strategies for a three level contract farming supply chain with subsidy abstract we consider a three level contract farming supply chain with a risk averse farmer a risk neutral supplier and a risk neutral distributor in which the farmer faces a yield uncertainty and the government offers agricultural subsidy to the farmer the cvar criterion is used to describe the risk averse behavior of the farmer we derive the optimal strategies of the supply chain and perform some sensitivity analysis to investigate the effects of the government subsidy and other factors the results indicate that as the subsidy increases the farmer s total target production increases further analysis shows that the total production increase is mainly from the increased farm size and the farmer s endeavor actually decreases in addition the results indicate that the profits of the supplier and the distributor both increase with respect to the subsidy however the impact of the subsidy on the farmer s profit depends on the farmer s degree of risk averse in particular the impact of the subsidy to the farmer s profit tends to be positive for farmers with high degree of risk averse and the impact tends to be negative for those with low degree of risk averse the sensitivity analysis is also performed for the level of yield uncertainty in term of the standard deviation

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

multicriteria analysis for agricultural resource management a critical survey and future perspectives abstract this paper reviews multicriteria analysis applied to agricultural resource management the applications utilize either methods for selecting multiattribute discrete alternatives including multiattribute utility theory or methods for solving multiobjective planning problems including goal programming our main purpose is to classify and evaluate the criteria attributes objectives used for modeling agricultural systems and to identify the difficulties for practitioners in applying the methodology the fields of study in agricultural decisions requiring further investigation are also discussed

distribution of cost and profit efficiency evidence from indian banking this paper uses the nonparametric dea methodology to estimate cost and profit efficiency of indian banks during the post reform period the results show considerable variation in average levels of profit efficiency across various ownership categories of banks in general state owned banks are found to be more efficient than their private counter parts further efficiency tends to be low among the small banks assets up to rs 50 billion indicating that at the existing scale of operations these banks are operating far below the efficient frontier we also examine the distribution of efficiency using nonparametric kernel density estimates the analysis reveals a rightward shift of the efficiency distribution over the years a major part of this shift comes from the state owned banks based on the conditional distribution the study finds strong evidence of ownership explaining the efficiency differential of banks additionally bank size and product mix are also found to be important although to a lesser extent

the financial crisis and indian banks survival of the fittest abstract the indian banking system was initially thought to be insulated from the global financial crisis owing to heavy public ownership and cautious management it was thus a surprise when some banks experienced deposit flight as depositors shifted their money toward government owned banks and specifically toward the state bank of india the largest public bank while there was some tendency for depositors to favour healthier banks and banks with more stable funding the reallocation of deposits toward the state bank of india cannot be explained by these factors alone rather it appears that the implicit government guarantee of the liabilities of the country s largest public bank dominated other considerations

data envelopment analysis truncated regression and double bootstrap for panel data with application to chinese banking we investigate the impact of earning asset diversification on chinese bank efficiency from 2006 to 2011 we do this by adapting the current two stage data envelopment analysis approach to a panel data setting so that we can account for technology change over time our monte carlo experiments illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed new algorithm over the conventional approach when applied to chinese banking data the regression results reveal that increasing the asset share of other earning assets including securities and derivatives is positively associated with bank efficiency decreasing the share of nonearning assets in total assets or increasing total equity has a similar impact our results also suggest that financial reforms currently being undertaken in china including removing the regulatory requirement concerning the ratio of loans to deposits a draft amendment to the existing commercial banking law and interest rate liberalization a proposed draft amendment are likely to have a positive effect on bank efficiency in china

green efficiency and environmental subsidy evidence from thermal power firms in china abstract to achieve green development ample environmental subsidies have been invested into many energy intensive firms such as thermal power firms in china investigations of the effects of this kind of subsidy can help to provide specific and important implications for ongoing regulations unlike previous studies on the national regional or sectoral level this paper measures green efficiency and its compositions of thermal power firms and studies the impact of environmental subsidies on green efficiency by using the classical slacks based measure and tobit model the results show that the average green efficiency ranges from 0 509 to 0 663 during 2010 2015 which is much lower than the general efficiency the green scale efficiency is the main reason for the low green efficiency thus indicating large room for improvement environmental subsidies negatively affect green efficiency and its decompositions from 2010 to 2013 the negative effect becomes weak and insignificant in 2014 and the environmental subsidies start to significantly promote green efficiency and its decompositions in 2015 according to our findings some implications relating to improving green scale efficiency increasing the intensity of environmental subsidies to firms and strengthening their supervision are proposed

the gains from takeover deregulation evidence from the end of interstate banking restrictions this paper uses interstate banking deregulation to explore the benefits of takeover deregulation and how these benefits are distributed across different firms we find large and significant abnormal returns around the interstate banking and branching efficiency act of 1994 which imply it created 85 billion of value in the banking industry consistent with an active market for corporate control allowing beneficial consolidation and providing needed discipline there is a strong negative relationship between banks abnormal returns and their prior performance consistent with managerial entrenchment limiting takeover discipline banks with higher insider ownership lower outside block ownership and or less independent boards have lower abnormal returns imagine an economy in which strict regulation has prohibited all takeover activity and the governing body suddenly announces that the restrictions on mergers and acquisitions will be eliminated in one year the capital market response to this announcement would establish the aggregate value added from an active corporate control market and differences between individual firms stock price reactions would reveal which firms benefit most from unrestricted consolidation and takeover discipline in some ways this hypothetical situation became reality for the u s banking industry in 1994 when congress wrote and passed the interstate banking and branching efficiency act ibbea this legislation liberalized the bank takeover market by eliminating the various state laws restricting bank mergers across state lines the ibbea was widely expected to accelerate the consolidation already occurring within the banking industry see for example american banker 10 11 94 a more active takeover market should increase firm values in at least two ways first unrestricted consolidation would allow firms to better utilize

the use of bootstrapped malmquist indices to reassess productivity change findings an application to a sample of polish farms this article assesses the extent to which sampling variation affects findings about malmquist productivity change derived using data envelopment analysis dea in the first stage by calculating productivity indices and in the second stage by investigating the farm specific change in productivity confidence intervals for malmquist indices are constructed using simar and wilson s 1999 bootstrapping procedure the main contribution of this article is to account in the second stage for the information in the second stage provided by the first stage bootstrap the dea ses of the malmquist indices given by bootstrapping are employed in an innovative heteroscedastic panel regression using a maximum likelihood procedure the application is to a sample of 250 polish farms over the period 1996 to 2000 the confidence intervals results suggest that the second half of 1990s for polish farms was characterized not so much by productivity regress but rather by stagnation as for the determinants of farm productivi

productivity and efficiency dynamics in indian banking an input distance function approach incorporating quality of inputs and outputs summary banking technology is typically characterized by multiple inputs and multiple outputs that are associated with various attributes such as different types of deposits loans number of accounts classes of employees and location of branches these quality differentials in inputs and outputs are mostly ignored in empirical studies these omissions make the practical value of productivity studies in organizations like banks questionable because quality is a key component of performance this paper proposes using hedonic aggregator functions as a tool of aggregating inputs and outputs with quality attributes within an input distance function framework and analyzes the impact of banking deregulation on efficiency and total factor productivity tfp change in the indian banking industry using panel data for the period 1996 2005 empirical results indicate that banks have improved their efficiency from 61 in 1996 to 72 in 2005 during the post deregulation period and the gain in efficiency of state owned banks has surpassed that of private banks improvement in capital base as indicated by increased capital adequacy ratio played an important role in ushering efficiency gain the return to scale estimate suggests that state owned banks are operating far above their efficient scale and cost savings can be obtained by reducing their size of operations overall tfp growth was above 3 5 annually both technical progress and technical efficiency change consistently played an important role in shaping tfp growth copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

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

bank productivity and performance groups a decomposition approach based upon the luenberger productivity indicator abstract the purpose of this paper is twofold first in the framework of the strategic groups literature it analyzes changes in productivity and efficiency of spanish private and savings banks over an eight year period 1998 2006 second by adapting the decomposition of the malmquist productivity indices suggested by fare et al 1994 it proposes similar components decomposing the luenberger productivity indicator initially productivity is decomposed into technological and efficiency changes thereafter this efficiency change is decomposed into pure efficiency scale and congestion changes empirical results demonstrate that productivity improvements are partially due to technological innovation furthermore it is shown how the competition between private and savings banks develops in terms of the analyzed productivity and efficiency components while private banks enjoy better efficiency change savings banks contribute more to technological progress consequently the luenberger components are used as cluster analysis inputs thus economic interpretations of the resulting performance groups are made via key differences in productivity components finally following the strategic groups literature supplementary insights are gained by linking these performance groups with banking ratios

economic reforms in india since 1991 has gradualism worked opinions on the causes of india s growth deceleration vary world economic growth was slower in the second half of the 1990s and that would have had some dampening effect but india s dependence on the world economy is not large enough for this to account for the slowdown critics of liberalization have blamed the slowdown on the effect of trade policy reforms on domestic industry however the opposite view is that the slowdown is due not to the effects of reforms but rather to the failure to implement the reforms effectively this in turn is often attributed to india s gradualist approach to reform which has meant a frustratingly slow pace of implementation however even a gradualist pace should be able to achieve significant policy changes over ten years this paper examines india s experience with gradualist reforms from this perspective

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

the impact of regulatory reforms on cost structure ownership and competition in indian banking this paper evaluates the impact of financial sector reforms on the cost structure characteristics and on the ownership cost efficiency relationship in indian banking it also examines the impact of reforms on the dynamics of competition in the lending market we find evidence that deregulation improves banks performance and fosters competition in the lending market results suggest technological progress once indian commercial banks have adjusted to the new regulatory environment this however does not translate in efficiency gains there is also evidence of an ownership effect on the level and pattern of efficiency change finally competition keeps building pace even in the re regulation period and technological improvements are not hampered by the tightening of prudential norms

radial and non radial decompositions of profit change with an application to indian banking abstract grifell tatje and lovell grifell tatje e lovell c a k 1999 profits and productivity management science 45 1177 1193 made significant contributions to the literature on the extended radial dea framework by decomposing profit change into six mutually exclusive components their approach however poses two basic problems first the radial estimates on these components might give conflicting signals about the direction of profit change after the full radial efficiencies are achieved when slacks are present second evaluations of these components using base period prices as weights can be potentially misleading to address these concerns we first introduce non radial dea models and then provide a few strong theoretical arguments in favor of using as weights either current period prices or an average price covering both periods to value the contributions of each of these components the indian banking sector is taken as a case study to illustrate the radial and non radial decompositions of profit change so as to empirically examine the role of competition on profit change and its drivers our broad empirical results are as follows first radial and non radial models yield diametrically opposite results on the contributions of various components second the increasing efficiency change trends in all ownership groups after 2002 indicate that the government reform process instituted on the banking industry has had a favorable effect on the performance of the indian banking sector third despite the fact that nationalized banks are the oldest banks their output and resource allocation behaviors do not reflect their learning experience

decomposition of productivity growth using distance functions the case of dairy farms in three european countries within an output distance function framework the total factor productivity growth index is decomposed into four components technical change technical and allocative efficiency and scale component we estimate stochastic translog output distance functions using panel data from dairy farms over the period 1991 94 for three european countries germany the netherlands and poland results indicate that the change in the productivity growth index in germany 6 and poland 5 are mainly dictated by the technical change component in contrast the productivity growth index in the netherlands 3 is influenced by allocative efficiency components

revisiting advance disclosure of insider trading abstract we derive a parametric restriction necessary and sufficient for an equilibrium to exist in the model of lenkey 2014 given this restriction the equilibrium is unique correcting findings in the original article that multiple equilibria may exist with advance disclosure

indian bank efficiency and productivity changes with undesirable outputs a disaggregated approach the objective of this study is to examine technical efficiency and productivity growth in the indian banking sector over the period from 2004 to 2011 we apply an innovative methodological approach introduced by chen et al 2011 and barros et al 2012 who use a weighted russell directional distance model to measure technical inefficiency we further modify and extend that model to measure tfp change with npls we find that the inefficiency levels are significantly different among the three ownership structure of banks in india foreign banks have strong market position in india and they pull the production frontier in a more efficient direction spbs and domestic private banks show considerably higher inefficiency we conclude that the restructuring policy applied in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the indian government has not had a long lasting effect

a nonparametric analysis of the determinants of family farm efficiency dynamics in lithuania this article presents insights into the efficiency of lithuanian family farms the research covers the years 2004 2009 and is based on farm level farm accountancy data network data bootstrapped data envelopment analysis was employed to obtain efficiency scores whereas stochastic kernels and multivariate methods viz fuzzy clustering and nonparametric regression were utilized to assess the impact of selected determinants on efficiency clustering analysis indicated that the efficiency change paths specific for the analyzed sample differed in both their average levels and ranges furthermore it was concluded that lithuanian agricultural policy should focus on increasing the efficiency of crop farms cluster analysis suggested that production subsidies might be having a negative effect on efficiency

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

efficiency dynamics in indian banking a conditional directional distance approach abstract the paper contributes to the contemporary research on bank efficiency in india we analyze the efficiency dynamics of the indian banking industry from 2004 to 2012 based on the recent methodological developments of the conditional and unconditional directional distances introduced by daraio and simar 2014 we apply a conditional directional distance estimator in order to analyze the dynamic effects of industry s performance levels the results indicate that foreign banks perform better compared to national and domestic private banks there is also evidence of technological change at the period before the global financial crisis however during and after the global financial crisis these gains diminished the evidence suggests that national banks fail to sustain their high performance levels gained after the industry s restructuring period finally the findings support the view that ownership structure affects banks technical efficiency levels

production incentives from static decoupling land use exclusion restrictions many agricultural support payments are based on past production with restrictions on how land may currently be used when support payments to field crops are analyzed in a static framework they do not directly impact current production decisions however over time as relative profits change these payments affect current output the payments may keep land in less profitable production of program crops through restrictions prohibiting potentially more profitable endeavors such as cultivating fruits and vegetables these payments have the potential to lead to production and trade distortions similar in magnitude to the distortions associated with direct production subsidies

the impact of liberalization on the productive efficiency of indian commercial banks abstract we examine the productive efficiency of 70 indian commercial banks during the early stages 1986 1991 of the ongoing period of liberalization we use data envelopment analysis to calculate radial technical efficiency scores we then use stochastic frontier analysis to attribute variation in the calculated efficiency scores to three sources a temporal component an ownership component and a random noise component we find publicly owned indian banks to have been the most efficient followed by foreign owned banks and privately owned indian banks we also find a temporal improvement in the performance of foreign owned banks virtually no trend in the performance of privately owned indian banks and a temporal decline in the performance of publicly owned indian banks we attempt to explain these patterns in terms of the government s evolving regulatory policies

nonparametric regression techniques in economics this introduction to nonparametric regression emphasizes techniques that might be most accessible and useful to the applied economist the paper begins with a brief overview of the class of models under study and central theoretical issues such as the curse of dimensionality the bias variance trade off and rates of convergence the paper then focuses on kernel and nonparametric least squares estimation of the nonparametric regression model and optimal differencing estimation of the partial linear model constrained estimation and hypothesis testing is also discussed empirical examples include returns to scale in electricity distribution and hedonic pricing of housing attributes

technical and scale efficiency of crop and livestock farms in poland does specialization matter l efficacite technique et d echelle des exploitations agricoles polonaises est calculee par la methode data envelopment analysis l etude porte sur les differences selon l orientation productive en grandes cultures ou elevage a deux dates de la transition en 1996 et en 2000 l article examine de plus la variabilite statistique des resultats d efficacite ceux ci sont revus a la lumiere des intervalles de confiance construits gr ce au bootstrapping en moyenne les exploitations d elevage ont une efficacite technique et d echelle superieure aux exploitations de grandes cultures l efficacite d echelle est toutefois tres elevee pour les deux orientations l inefficacite technique semble donc due principalement a une inefficacite technique pure c est a dire a une gestion inefficace la faible education des agriculteurs en est une raison majeure en 2000 64 des exploitations d elevage et 86 des exploitations de grandes cultures presentaient des retours d echelle croissants ce resultat suggere des recommandations politiques afin de supprimer les incitations a garder une structure operationnelle fragmentee et de stimuler le marche de la terre il s agit en particulier d ameliorer la legislation concernant la location des terres et de modifier le systeme de retraite agricole

state passage of interstate banking legislation an analysis of firm legislative and economic characteristics abstract forty nine states and the district of columbia enacted legislation reducing interstate banking restrictions between july 1982 and april 1993 for these 50 banking bills deregulation increased the average price of bank stocks returns vary cross sectionally by firm characteristics regulatory features and economic conditions returns are positively related to the characteristics of acquisition targets furthermore returns are positively related to legislative features that increase the bargaining power of potential targets and economic conditions that are likely to encourage bank acquisition these findings are consistent with the relaxation of geographic restrictions increasing activity in the corporate control market

a generalized production frontier approach for estimating determinants of inefficiency in u s dairy farms this article investigates farm level efficiency of u s dairy farmers by estimating their technical and allocative efficiency technical inefficiency is assumed to be composed of a deterministic component that is a function of some farm specific characteristics and a random component by doing this we extend the stochastic frontier methodology in which determinants of technicial inefficiency are explicitly introduced in the model given the inputs variations in efficiency of farms are then explained by both deterministic and random components of technical inefficiency the empirical results indicate that a levels of education of the farmer are important factors determining technical inefficiency and b large farms are more efficient technically than small and medium sized farms both technical and allocative inefficiency are found to decrease with increase in the level of education of the farmer

efficiency assessment of primary care providers a conditional nonparametric approach this paper uses a fully nonparametric approach to estimate efficiency measures for primary care units incorporating the effect of exogenous environmental factors this methodology allows us to account for different types of variables continuous and discrete describing the main characteristics of patients served by those providers in addition we use an extension of this nonparametric approach to deal with the presence of undesirable outputs in data represented by the rates of hospitalization for ambulatory care sensitive condition acsc the empirical results show that all the exogenous variables considered have a significant and negative effect on efficiency estimates

economic growth and environmental efficiency evidence from us regions abstract this paper proposes a conditional directional distance function estimator in order to examine the link between regional environmental efficiency and gdp per capita levels as an illustrative example we apply our model to us regional data revealing an inverted u shape relationship between regional environmental efficiency and per capita income the results derived from a non parametric regression indicate a turning point at 49 000 dollars

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

technical efficiency of alternative farming systems the case of greek organic and conventional olive growing farms abstract olive growing is a major farming activity in greek agriculture this paper analyzes empirically the technical efficiency of organic and conventional olive growing farms using a stochastic production frontier methodology and a translog functional specification findings indicate that the organic olive growing farms examined exhibit a higher degree of technical efficiency relative to their production frontier than do conventional olive growing farms reasons may include lower profit margins and restrictions on inputs permitted thus forcing organic farmers to be more cautious with input use however both input and output oriented technical efficiency scores are still relatively low for both types of olive farming thus there is considerable scope for cost reducing and farm income improvement in both farming modes this could prove crucial for the long run viability and the future course of the sector

the production effects of agricultural income support policies under uncertainty this analysis decomposes the production impacts of income support programs into wealth insurance and coupling effects under the usual assumptions about preferences the wealth and insurance effects of many support programs increase optimal input levels even for supposedly decoupled programs if the program is coupled in the usual sense then all three effects often act in the same direction it is concluded that studies of trade and domestic policy reform in stochastic environments should consider insurance and wealth effects the derivative conditions required to obtain results are also subjected to scrutiny simulations for an iowa corn producer confirm the comparative statics

the influence of public subsidies on farm technical efficiency a robust conditional nonparametric approach the objective of this paper is to assess the influence of public subsidies on farm technical efficiency using recent advances in nonparametric efficiency analysis to this end we use robust conditional frontier techniques as well as insights from recent developments in nonparametric econometrics the paper contributes to the ongoing methodological discussion on how to model the effect of public subsidies on farmers production decisions the analysis is conducted using an unbalanced panel data of 1604 observations from 313 french farms located in the french region meuse over the period 2006 2011 the estimates indicate that public subsidies influence negatively the conditional technical efficiency of farms this suggests that public subsidies affect both the range of the attainable set for the inputs and outputs and the distribution of the efficiency scores inside the attainable set

a robust nonparametric approach to evaluate and explain the performance of mutual funds the topic of the measurement of mutual funds performance is receiving an increasing interest both from an applied and a theoretical perspective beside the traditional financial literature a growing body of studies has started to apply the tools of frontier analysis for benchmarking comparisons in portfolio analysis our paper contributes to this literature proposing a robust nonparametric approach for analysing mutual funds it is based on the concept of order m frontier cazals c florens j p simar l 2002 nonparametric frontier estimation a robust approach journal of econometrics 106 1 25 and on a probabilistic approach daraio c simar l 2005 introducing environmental variables in nonparametric frontier models a probabilistic approach journal of productivity analysis 24 1 93 121 to find out the factors explaining mutual funds performance within this framework a decomposition of conditional efficiency is proposed and its usefulness for economic interpretation analysed our approach is illustrated by using us mutual funds data grouped for category by objective economies of scale slacks and market risks are investigated a comparison of traditional nonparametric and robust performance measures is also offered

estimating a bayesian stochastic frontier for the indian banking system abstract this paper employs a bayesian stochastic frontier providing exact inference on both cost and profit efficiencies of the indian banking sector in the period of 2000 2006 we also test for the inclusion of off balance sheet data in model specification the findings suggest that public banks are the most efficient followed by private and foreign banks however the latter largely improved profit efficiency outperforming domestic banks by the end of the sample accounting for off balance sheet activities significantly improves profit efficiency levels

deregulation ownership and productivity growth in the banking industry evidence from india this paper analyzes the relationship between deregulation and total factor productivity tfp growth in the indian banking industry using a generalized shadow cost function approach tfp growth is decomposed into a technological change a scale and a miscellaneous component a disaggregated panel data analysis using the population of public and private banks over 1985 96 that covers both pre and post deregulation periods indicates that a significant decline in regulatory distortions and the anticipated increase in tfp growth have not yet materialized following deregulation while private sector banks have improved their performance mainly due to the freedom to expand output public sector banks have not responded well to the deregulation measures

measuring technical efficiency in the presence of pesticide spillovers and production uncertainty the case of dutch arable farms pesticides dynamic effects and production uncertainty play an important role in farmers production decisions pesticides have a current production impact through reducing crop damage in the current period and a future impact through impacting the farm biodiversity which alters the future production environment this study presents the difference in inefficiency arising from models that ignore the dynamic effects of pesticides in production decisions and the impact of production uncertainty a dynamic data envelopment analysis dea model is applied to outputs inputs and undesirables of dutch arable farms over the period 2003 2007 a bootstrap approach is used to explain farmers performance providing empirical representations of the impact of stochastic elements on production these empirical representations are used to adjust firms inefficiency scores to incorporate production uncertainty in efficiency evaluation we find that efficiency increased dramatically when a production technology representation that considers both pesticides dynamic impacts and production uncertainty is adopted

advance disclosure of insider trading using a strategic rational expectations equilibrium framework we show that forcing a well informed insider to disclose her trades in advance tends to increase welfare for both the insider and less informed outsiders advance disclosure generates price risk for the insider and to mitigate this risk the insider trades less aggressively on her private information consequently outsiders face lower adverse selection costs which improves risk sharing and increases welfare the drop in trading aggressiveness also causes market efficiency to decline furthermore pretrade disclosure encourages excessive risk taking but may either encourage or discourage managerial effort

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

one and multi directional conditional efficiency measurement efficiency in lithuanian family farms abstract this paper analyses farming efficiency by the means of the partial frontiers and multi directional efficiency analysis mea in particular we apply the idea of the conditional efficiency framework to the mea approach to ensure that observations are compared to their homogeneous counterparts moreover this paper shows that combining the traditional one directional and multi directional efficiency framework yields valuable insights it allows one to identify what factors matter in terms of output production and input consumption the application deals with lithuanian family farms for which we have a rich dataset the results indicate that the output efficiency positively correlates to a time trend and negatively to the subsidy share in the total output the mea based analysis further suggests that the time trend has been positively affecting the productive efficiency due to increase in the labour use efficiency meanwhile the increasing subsidy rate has a negative influence upon mea efficiencies associated with all the inputs

credit market imperfections and the distribution of policy rents this article shows that credit market imperfections have important implications for the distribution of policy rents in a model with land as fixed factor and credit market imperfections when an area payment is given land rents go up by more than the subsidy on aggregate farms may lose from the subsidy the results depend on the extent to which subsidies have direct and indirect effects on the credit constraints on whether farms rent or own land and on farm heterogeneity

differential impact on bank valuation of interstate banking law changes abstract by 1988 forty seven states and the district of columbia had enacted legislation liberalizing interstate banking restrictions this study systematically investigates the market impact of these law changes on bank stock prices using an event parameter event study methodology we assess the differential impact on in state and out of state banks to a given state law change we also assess the differential impact of law changes upon banks included in or excluded from any regional compacts among states money center banks are treated as a special class of out of state or excluded banks we find that out of state and out of region banks excluding money center banks have profited most from these law changes and money center banks have been least positively affected both at the time of enactment and at the effective date of the law changes we attribute these findings to the opening of interstate banking opportunities to other than money center and foreign banks thus leveling the playing field

population economic growth and regional environmental inefficiency evidence from u s states we apply a conditional directional distance function allowing multiple exogenous factors to measure environmental performance we evaluate the air pollution performance levels of u s states for the years 1998 and 2008 states environmental inefficiency is determined by population size and gdp per capita gdppc the overall results reveal that there is much variation in environmental inefficiencies among the u s states a second stage nonparametric analysis indicates a nonlinear relationship between states population size gdppc levels and states environmental inefficiency levels our results indicate that environmental inefficiency on the whole decreases with increased population and income per capita but there are limits to this improvement and at high income and population levels the tendency may reverse

cost revenue and profit efficiency measurement in dea a directional distance function approach abstract estimation of efficiency of firms in a non competitive market characterized by heterogeneous inputs and outputs along with their varying prices is questionable when factor based technology sets are used in data envelopment analysis dea in this scenario a value based technology becomes an appropriate reference technology against which efficiency can be assessed in this contribution the value based models of tone 2002 are extended in a directional dea set up to develop new directional cost and revenue based measures of efficiency which are then decomposed into their respective directional value based technical and allocative efficiencies these new directional value based measures are more general and include the existing value based measures as special cases these measures satisfy several desirable properties of an ideal efficiency measure these new measures are advantageous over the existing ones in terms of 1 their ability to satisfy the most important property of translation invariance 2 choices over the use of suitable direction vectors in handling negative data and 3 flexibility in providing the decision makers with the option of specifying preferable direction vectors to incorporate their preferences finally under the condition of no prior unit price information a directional value based measure of profit inefficiency is developed for firms whose underlying objectives are profit maximization for an illustrative empirical application our new measures are applied to a real life data set of 50 us banks to draw inferences about the production correspondence of banking industry

on the computation of returns in tests of the stock market overreaction hypothesis abstract a number of recent studies have attempted to find out whether investors overreact we argue that in many of these studies the method used to compute cumulative returns the arithmetic method is flawed and we show that estimates of portfolio performance can be affected our findings are relevant not only to tests of the overreaction hypothesis but to other areas in finance where the arithmetic method and event study approach are used

determinants of technical efficiency of crop and livestock farms in poland la pologne est l un des pays d europe de l est candidats a une accession a l union europeenne qui rencontre de graves problemes de restructuration agricole l article etudie l efficacite technique en 2000 d exploitations agricoles individuelles polonaises specialisees en elevage et en grandes cultures l efficacite est estimee par la methode de frontiere stochastique et sa variabilite statistique evaluee par la construction d intervalles de confiance l article examine egalement les determinants de l efficacite les resultats obtenus pas la methode de frontiere stochastique sont compares avec ceux obtenus par la methode de data envelopment analysis dea en moyenne l efficacite technique des exploitations d elevage est superieure a celle des exploitations de grandes cultures pour les deux specialisations la relation entre l efficacite et la taille des exploitations est positive les grandes exploitations sont les plus efficaces les resultats obtenus par la methode de frontiere stochastique sont generalement confirmes par la methode dea la qualite de la terre et le degre d integration dans les marches d aval sont d importants determinants de l efficacite la faible education est un obstacle majeur a l efficacite en particulier pour les exploitations de grandes cultures de plus celles ci utilisent beaucoup les marches de facteurs terre et travail alors que les exploitations d elevage utilisent plutot leurs propres terres et le travail familial