do greens drive hummers or hybrids environmental ideology as a determinant of consumer choice this paper uses several california data sets to test for differences in consumption patterns between greens and browns a person s environmentalism is rarely observed in consumer data sets in california a community s share of green party registered voters is a viable proxy for community environmentalism environmentalists are more likely to commute by public transit purchase hybrid vehicles and consume less gasoline than non environmentalists

do governors get what they want an alternative examination of the line item veto this paper reconsiders the impact of the governor s line item veto on the state budget process the governor s ability to obtain his or her most desired budget measures item veto effectiveness rather than a smaller expenditure budget the percentage difference between the final state budget and the governor s original budget request over fiscal years 1983 1989 is examined the empirical results indicate that under certain political situations the line item veto authority enhances the governor s ability to obtain his or her desired budget

bootstrapping the data envelopment analysis malmquist productivity index this paper presents a bootstrap approach to calculate confidence intervals for firm specific malmquist productivity indices obtained from data envelopment analysis dea models the bootstrap is easily implemented and allows identification of production units that have significant productivity changes an application using data from swedish eye care departments is included we find that 40 of departments have significant progress in productivity whereas only 10 of the departments have a significant regress in productivity this differs from the original results where about half the sample have estimates of progress and the other half have estimates of regress in productivity

a fresh look at the productivity and efficiency changes of uk airlines this article uses the bootstrapped malmquist index methodology to measure and test the extent of efficiency and productivity changes in the uk airline sector the aim of the bootstrap method is to overcome the statistical limitations of the data envelopment analysis dea method generally used to measure the distance functions of the malmquist index in applying the method we use input output data on a sample of major uk airlines for the period 2004 2007 results showed that most airlines have witnessed significant decrease in their productivity efficiency scale and technology measures using a second stage tobit regression this article attributed the sources of productivity and efficiency changes to factors such as stage length load factor and airline size this article also discussed the negative impacts of oil price using illustrations from the uk and other international airlines

line item veto where is thy sting roponents of giving the president the authority to use a line item veto argue that the institutional change is needed to limit special interest legislation and restrain spending opponents respond that it would grant too much added power to the president thereby upsetting the delicate balance wisely crafted by the founding fathers this article focuses on the presumption evidently shared by both sides in the debate that adoption of item veto authority will have significant consequences in terms of budget outcomes and the distribution of power 1 curiously there presently exists little empirical support for the presumption that item veto authority is important most studies comparing states with various types of veto authority have failed to detect significant effects associated with item veto additional tests of our own are consistent with these results after reviewing the empirical evidence we reconsider the alleged effects of item veto authority by seating the popular depiction in an explicit model of the budgetary process formal modeling exposes logical inconsistencies contained in popular veto discourse further the model makes clear that the predicted consequences of item veto commonly projected as ubiquitous in fact arise only in select settings

anticipation tax avoidance and the price elasticity of gasoline demand summary least squares estimates of the response of gasoline consumption to a change in the gasoline price are biased toward zero given the endogeneity of gasoline prices a seemingly natural solution to this problem is to instrument for gasoline prices using gasoline taxes but this approach tends to yield implausibly large price elasticities we demonstrate that anticipatory behavior provides an important explanation for this result gasoline buyers increase purchases before tax increases and delay purchases before tax decreases rendering the tax instrument endogenous including suitable leads and lags in the regression restores the validity of the iv estimator resulting in much lower elasticity estimates copyright 2016 john wiley sons ltd

peer effects in the diffusion of solar photovoltaic panels social interaction peer effects are recognized as a potentially important factor in the diffusion of new products in the case of environmentally friendly goods or technologies both marketers and policy makers are interested in the presence of causal peer effects as social spillovers can be used to expedite adoption we provide a methodology for the simple straightforward identification of peer effects with sufficiently rich data avoiding the biases that occur with traditional fixed effects estimation when using the past installed base of consumers in the reference group we study the diffusion of solar photovoltaic panels in california and find that at the average number of owner occupied homes in a zip code an additional installation increases the probability of an adoption in the zip code by 0 78 percentage points our results provide valuable guidance to marketers designing strategies to increase referrals and reduce customer acquisition costs they also provide insights into the diffusion process of environmentally friendly technologies

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

final voting in legislatures in representative democracies such as the united states legislatures provide the transmission mechanism through which pressure from private interests becomes public policy considerable attention has been given in the literature to explanations of the relevant forces that appear to be driving the legislative process for example much research has focused on the relative impact of economic vs ideological influences on congressional voting behavior in this approach the way that legislators vote on proposed legislation is modeled as a function of the preferences of various economic and ideological interests groups including the legislator s own preferences for wealth and ideology james kau and paul rubin 1979 joseph kalt and mark zupan 1984 sam peltzman 1985 missing from this approach is the idea that when legislatures are the transmission mechanism they are costly and imperfect organizations for generating political influence gary becker 1983 as such rules and institutions will emerge that are related to problems of internal control within the organization of a legislature in this paper we focus on the role of floor voting from the standpoint of legislator organization and control we seek to expand the interpretation of the meaning of floor voting activity by examining the timing sequence and outcomes of such votes specifically we look at final floor voting in the u s congress the patterns described in the analysis below suggest that a broader analytical perspective on the economic function of floor voting is required the findings also suggest that to identify more precisely the forces that are driving legislator voting behavior it is important to recognize the role of legislative transactional costs and institutional constraints in section i the conceptual framework for the empirical results is discussed in more detail the purpose is not to develop a fullblown theory of legislative organization rather it is to focus the reader s attention on several hypotheses about the function of final floor voting as a device for controlling legislator behavior within the legislature empirical results including an explanation of the timing and sequence of final votes on bills are reported in section ii the data for these tests are drawn from legislative activities in the u s house of representatives during the 96th and 98th congresses some concluding remarks are offered in section iii

executive veto power and credit claiming the line item veto has often be heralded as an effective tool in reducing pork barrel spending a model of veto bargaining over public goods and pork barrel spending in the presence of credit claiming incentives demonstrates that the item veto does not necessarily reduce pork barrel spending and reduces the executive s ability to attain his preferred level of spending on public goods the item veto also has an ambiguous effect on the balance of power between the executive and the legislature while strengthening the position of the legislative agenda setter within the legislature

bargaining in legislatures bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures in our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting the model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard institution free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium

bias and precision in the dea two stage method in data envelopment analysis dea the two stage method is a popular procedure for accounting for exogenous influences on efficiency with the conventional two stage method a dea is first conducted using only traditional endogenous inputs and outputs then the first stage dea scores are regressed on the environmental contextual exogenous inputs of interest the regression outcomes are used to identify exogenous inputs that influence the first stage dea scores to a statistically significant degree and to adjust dea scores to account for these influences herein it is demonstrated empirically that the conventional method exhibits substantial bias and low precision with the degree of bias and precision affected by input variance and correlation a reverse two stage procedure that yields estimates without the bias and precision problems that compromise the validity of the conventional method s estimates is suggested

resampling dea estimates of investment fund performance abstract data envelopment analysis dea is attractive for comparing investment funds because it handles different characteristics of fund distribution and gives a way to rank funds there is substantial literature applying dea to funds based on the time series of funds returns this article looks at the issue of uncertainty in the resulting dea efficiency estimates investigating consistency and bias it uses the bootstrap to develop stochastic dea models for funds derive confidence intervals and develop techniques to compare and rank funds and represent the ranking it investigates how to deal with autocorrelation in the time series and considers models that deal with correlation in the funds returns

executive veto and informational strategy a structure induced equilibrium analysis this paper explores the strategic value of incomplete preference revelation for an executive with veto authority within a budgetary process the analysis indicates which forms of veto power can be augmented by the strategic manipulation of information on preferences the lesson of the analysis is that the failure to consider the strategic value of incomplete preference revelation is a methodological shortcoming of standard structure induced equilibrium analysis since without such consideration equilibrium outcomes are subject to misspecification the true power bestowed upon individual political actors by alternative institutions is misunderstood and the informational gamesmanship that is so much a part of the political process is left unexplained

environmental preferences and consumer behavior abstract this paper demonstrates that environment conscious consumers have lower gasoline retail tax exclusive price and excise tax elasticities suggesting that they are less sensitive to changes in prices and taxes than their less environmental counterparts these results on an american state year dataset are robust to the use of two environmental proxies and to the instrumentation of gasoline retail prices these findings support the existence of heterogeneous environmental preferences by demonstrating that certain consumers incorporate environmental ideology into their utility functions distinctly from income considerations the implication that environmental preferences contribute to differential responsiveness to pecuniary signals has repercussions for the forecasting of consumer behavior and for the ease of implementation of environmental policy

using panel data analysis to estimate confidence intervals for the dea efficiency of individual decision making units this article demonstrates a methodology using panel data analysis to estimate confidence intervals for the data envelopment analysis efficiency of individual decision making units dmus and the statistical significance of trends in individual dmu efficiency the procedure accounts for stochastic variations of the inputs and outputs of the target dmu as well as stochastic variations of the inputs and outputs of its efficient benchmark peers the procedure is demonstrated using 9 years of data from 34 canadian paratransit agencies

estimation of profit functions when profit is not maximum this paper deals with derivation and implications of profit functions when profit is not maximum due to the presence of either technical inefficiency or allocative inefficiency or both we show that input demand and output supply elasticities and returns to scale are in general affected by these inefficiencies we also show that the overall profit efficiency is not necessarily the product of technical and allocative efficiencies meaning that technical and allocative inefficiencies are not necessarily independent estimation techniques are developed for both cross sectional and panel data models working of the model is illustrated using a panel of 60 salmon farms copyright 2001 oxford university press

efficiency analysis of german electricity distribution utilities non parametric and parametric tests this study applies non parametric and parametric tests to assess the efficiency of electricity distribution companies in germany traditional issues in electricity sector benchmarking are addressed such as the role of scale effects and optimal utility size as well as new evidence specific to the situation in germany labour capital and peak load capacity are used as inputs and units sold and the number of customers as output the data cover 307 out of 553 german electricity distribution utilities a data envelopment analysis dea is applied with constant returns to scale crs as the main productivity analysis technique whereas stochastic frontier analysis sfa with distance function is the verification method the results suggest that returns to scale play but a minor role only very small utilities have a significant cost advantage low customer density is found to affect the efficiency score significantly in particular in the lower third of all observations surprisingly east german utiliti

gasoline demand revisited an international meta analysis of elasticities meta analysis is used to determine if there are factors that systematically affect price and income elasticity estimates in studies of gasoline demand four econometric models are estimated using long run and short run price and income elasticity estimates from previous studies as the dependent variables explanatory variables include functional form lag structure time span national setting estimation technique and other features of the model structure elasticity estimates are found to be sensitive to the inclusion or exclusion of some measure of vehicle ownership static models appear to overestimate short run elasticities underestimate long run price elasticities but pick up the full long run income responsiveness there is variation in the elasticity of demand across countries especially in the short run and gasoline demand appears to be getting more price elastic and less income elastic over time

malmquist productivity index decompositions a unifying framework in two widely cited but unpublished working papers simar and wilson 1998 and zofio and lovell 1998 proposed an alternative decomposition of the malmquist productivity index which retained what seemed to be the strongholds of previous proposals with regard to the contribution of technological and efficiency change to productivity change namely a technical change term with regard to the best practice variable returns to scale vrs technology which is to be found in ray and desli 1997 and a scale efficiency change term that illustrates a firm s situation with regard to optimal scale benchmark technology fare et al 1994 attaining this objective required the introduction of an additional term in the malmquist productivity index decomposition which would reflect the scale bias of technical change it is our objective to provide economic rationale for this term within a theory of production context the existing decompositions and recent articles that further elaborate on this issue the ide

dual pareto efficiency abstract consider an economy with d commodities and n individuals a pair p m where p is a price vector and m m1 m2 mn is a set of n individual income levels defines a set of individual budget constraints it is known that such pairs provide a framework for duality based investigations of pareto efficient allocations and of equilibria this paper employs this framework in a general setting not requiring smoothness or boundedness of budget sets to develop duals of the first and second theorems of welfare economics namely under suitable assumptions 1 the price income pair associated with any equilibrium is dual pareto efficient and 2 corresponding to any dual pareto efficient pair there is an allocation which together with the given prices forms an equilibrium journal of economic literature classification number s d00 d50 d51 d6l

political preferences for the pork barrel a generalization this paper provides a rational explanation for the observation of oversized coalitions often approaching unanimous size in the realm of distributive policies distributive policies are those which concentrate benefits in specific geographic areas states congressional districts while spreading costs through general taxation the explanation offered here that legislators may rationally prefer universalism to hard ball coalition politics generalizes earlier work of weingast and fiorina in particular it extends their results to pork barrel politics i e projects that are economically inefficient and demonstrates how packages of economically inefficient projects can nevertheless be politically popular the main theoretical feature that induces preferences for universalism is uncertainty over the composition of winning coalitions and consequently the desire for the political insurance that universalism provides

impacts of random noise and specification on estimates of capacity derived from data envelopment analysis abstract data envelopment analysis dea is widely used to estimate the efficiency of firms and has also been proposed as a tool to measure technical capacity and capacity utilization cu random variation in output data can lead to downward bias in dea estimates of efficiency and consequently upward bias in estimates of technical capacity this can be particularly problematic for industries such as agriculture aquaculture and fisheries where the production process is inherently stochastic due to environmental influences this research uses monte carlo simulations to investigate possible biases in dea estimates of technically efficient output and capacity output attributable to noisy data and investigates the impact of using a model specification that allows for variable returns to scale vrs we demonstrate a simple method of reducing noise induced bias when panel data is available we find that dea capacity estimates are highly sensitive to noise and model specification analogous conclusions can be drawn regarding dea estimates of average efficiency

presidential pork executive veto power and distributive politics mitigated to the extent that the president prefers spending in some districts over others the model also generates new insights and predictions about fiscal policy under the separation of powers including the effects of divided government electoral rules and term limitations for the executive

the line item veto and public sector budgets evidence from the states abstract the paper examines the claim that gubernatorial line item veto power reduces state spending analysis of a rich set of state budget data indicates that long run budgets are not altered by an item veto and that in the short run the item veto s potency is contingent upon the political setting in certain circumstances governors with political incentives to use an item veto alter spending and revenues in a statistically significant and quantitatively important fashion these results suggest that state budgets have not been importantly altered as a result of the existence of the line item veto and shed doubt on the use of the line item veto to reduce federal government spending

an institutional theory of divided government and party polarization this paper develops a simple model of institutionally driven party competition which may explain the persistence of divided government in the basic model two parties that are solely motivated to win elections compete for two offices the legislature and the executive parties offer positions in a single dimension to a single district sophisticated electorate that understands the institutionally defined relationship between electoral and policy outcomes when parties are risk averse competition for the two offices leads to a prisoner s dilemma the parties can jointly improve on the one shot nash equilibrium in which they adopt convergent positions several extensive form election games are shown to allow the parties to solve their prisoner s dilemma in a subgame perfect nash equilibrium in such an equilibrium parties adopt widely separated positions and divided government and splitticket voting occur with high probability unlike typical voting models in the basic model there is no tendency for electoral equilibrium to produce the expected median voter s ideal policy outcome these results are robust to a variety of extensions including significant sincere voting multiple policy dimensions and defections by incumbent candidates

executive veto and spending limitation positive political economy with implications for institutional choice the consequences of institutional change in the budgetary process are not generally determinate independent of the preferences of political actors nonetheless this study shows for a general class of preference configurations that the legislative branch cannot be made better off by a spending limitation unless the executive is empowered with a line item veto in the absence of executive item veto authority there is no incentive for the legislature to constrain spending

measuring production efficiency of acute hospitals in scotland 1991 94 validity issues in data envelopment analysis data envelopment analysis is a potentially useful technique for measuring production efficiency and is being increasingly applied to health care services as with other areas however some fundamental concerns need to be addressed before data envelopment analysis can be accepted widely as a routine tool these include issues of validity and specification error this paper suggests a broad framework for assessing validity which should be developed further and gives illustrative examples of the problems in a real application within health care data from 75 scottish acute hospitals for three years from 1991 94 are analysed internal validity is assessed by examining the effect on the results obtained of the choice of inputs and outputs selected for analysis external validity is assessed by examining differences in the results obtained from the data for each of the three years in both cases it is concluded that there is a disturbing lack of concordance between the different results obtained caution mu

the determinants of efficiency in municipal governments this article investigates efficiency in the municipal sector of the region of murcia spain with that aim data of 31 municipalities 69 of the response rate have been collected services analysed are police culture sports green areas refuse collection and water supply ratios of efficiency have been related to other control variables such as economic level size of the municipality decentralization political sign and financial situation a weak positive relation between economic level and efficiency arises some weak evidence also exists that public management of refuse collection is more efficient than private in water supply public management by means of a company controlled by the local government is clearly more efficient than private it also seems that the higher the tax burden the greater the efficiency in providing services

assessing school efficiency in portugal using fdh and bootstrapping this study explores a new data set that contains information both on inputs and outputs for a sample of portuguese secondary schools an fdh reference technology is used to determine radial technical efficiency scores and slacks although it is known that there is no reason to assume convexity in the study of education efficiency frontiers this is the first study ever to use fdh at the school level effectively relaxing the convexity assumption a two stage approach is used whereby the significant environmental variables that explain fdh efficiency scores and slacks are identified for the purpose of statistical inference the first application of the bootstrapping algorithms suggested by simar and wilson 2003 is conducted the study concludes that the unemployment rate access to health care services adult education and living infrastructures are determinants of school efficiency the differences between the coast and the interior of portugal seem to be more relevant as far as school efficiency is

measurement of hospital efficiency using a latent class stochastic frontier model this article analyses the technical efficiency of portuguese hospitals from 1997 to 2008 with the latent class frontier model enabling the identification of different segments in the cost frontier it is found that there are three statistically significant segments in the sample leading to the conclusion that no common health policy can be applicable to all the hospitals analysed calling rather for policies conceived for each hospital segment identified the health policy based in the identified segments enables a more accurate and cost effective management of resources

on two definitions of productivity abstract caves et al in 1982 introduced a productivity measure that does not proceed from a continuous timer presentation they named these indexes after sten malmquist who in 1953 used ratios of distance functions to formulate quantity indexes in the consumer context in a later paper diewert proposed an alternative definition of productivity also based on distance functions which he attributed to hicks and moorsteen in this letter we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the malmquist productivity index to equal the hicks moorsteen index

cooperation and punishment under repeated majority voting in light of the extensive theoretical evidence suggesting absence of equilibrium in voting models tullock 1981 asks why so much stability our results suggest the following answer political agents engaged in long term relationships can sustain highly stable allocations if there are strongly held norms for punishment of defectors 1

efficiency of hospitals in germany a dea bootstrap approach various attempts to assess the performance of german hospitals have generated a wide range of estimates regarding their efficiency these attempts were based on different often rather small data sets consisting of heterogeneous hospitals the techniques applied range from simple benchmarking approaches to studies which employ data envelopment analysis dea some studies report dramatic differences in efficiency and propose savings potentials of 50 others find an average efficiency in excess of 95 and characterize almost 75 of their observations as fully efficient this study presents results for two datasets representative of two segments of the german hospital system these segments comprise all hospitals that have one internal medicine and one surgery department the hospitals are located in the old federal states of germany none of the hospitals provides tertiary care dea can be applied because all hospitals offer a comparable quality and range of services the results were estimated with a d

executive veto legislative override and structure induced equilibrium in this study the structure induced equilibrium approach for modeling democratic institutions is extended to allow for the added structural features of executive veto and legislative override a multidimensional model is presented for a budgetary process involving three actors a legislature an appropriations committee and an executive in order to focus attention on the role of the veto and override possibilities simplifying assumptions are made with regard to other aspects of the agenda formation process in particular the committee has monopoly agenda power a closed amendment control rule is operative and perfect foresight expectations are held by the committee and the executive given these assumptions utility maximization by the several actors generates a budget outcome characterized as a structure induced equilibrium the general model is illustrated geometrically with a two dimensional example permitting budget outcomes to be analyzed for various combinations of veto rules and override provisions the analysis demonstrates that budget outcomes are sensitive to alternative specifications of veto rules and override provisions in the illustration executive veto power is shown to vary directly with both the permissiveness of the veto rule and the stringency of the override provision similar relationships however are not found to exist for total budget expenditures

testing scale efficiency in dea models a bootstrapping approach this paper presents a method for estimation and test of firm specific scale efficiency using data envelopment analysis dea the use of a simple bootstrap algorithm is proposed to perform firm specific inference for scale efficiency an empirical application using swedish hospital data is provided it is found that about 40 of the departments were scale efficient according to the original results however for about one third of those departments the hypothesis of scale efficiency could be rejected

divided government and u s trade policy theory and evidence if different parties control the u s congress and white house the united states may maintain higher import protection than otherwise this proposition follows from a distributive politics model in which congress can choose to delegate trade policymaking to the president when the congressional majority party faces a president of the other party the former has an incentive to delegate to but to constrain the president by requiring congressional approval of trade proposals by up or down vote this constraint forces the president to provide higher protection in order to assemble a congressional majority evidence confirms that 1 the institutional constraints placed on the president s trade policymaking authority are strengthened in times of divided government and loosened under unified government and 2 u s trade policy was significantly more protectionist under divided than under unified government during the period 1949 90

consistency in performance rankings the peru water sector regulators can utilize a number of alternative methodologies for comparing firm efficiency but these approaches need to be robust to be accepted by stakeholders this study evaluates the consistency of water utility performance rankings for peruvian water utilities the results indicate that data envelopment analysis dea and stochastic frontier analysis sfa yield similar rankings in this case in addition the techniques have comparable success for identifying the best and worst performing utilities however these rankings based on sophisticated statistical techniques are not highly correlated with those developed by the peruvian water regulator sunass this result does not invalidate the performance rankings obtained by the regulator since those rankings are based on more dimensions of utility performance however they illustrate the importance of developing sound techniques for identifying weak utilities improvements in sector performance require that benchmarking be given greater attention t

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

biases in technical efficiency scores caused by intra input aggregation mathematical analysis and a dea application using simulated data in data envelopment analysis dea applications involving multiple inputs and outputs inputs are aggregated into the total amounts of each type of input for example if input types labour and capital are used to produce multiple outputs the total amount of labour used to produce all outputs is treated as one aggregated input and the total amount of capital as another resources are not disaggregated into input variables measuring the amount of labour used to produce the first output the amount of labour used to produce the second output the amount of labour used to produce the third output and so on for both labour and capital it is shown that such intra input aggregation causes downward bias in reported technical efficiency scores with variations in bias unrelated to true technical efficiency therefore with few exceptions any technical efficiency comparisons among dmus are invalid the presence of intra input aggregation bias is demonstrated mathematically simulation is used to exhibit it

impact of input substitution and output transformation on data envelopment analysis decisions abstractdata envelopment analysis dea can aid managerial decision making because it offers an opportunity to measure organizational performance in a holistic manner aggregating data from partial indicators into a single comprehensive measure however there are some methodological hazards associated with the use of dea that are especially relevant to managerial decisions but which have been largely ignored in the literature herein we identify and show the impact of a ubiquitous methodological hazard in dea modelling the economic assumptions regarding input substitutions and output transformations

on the in efficiency of swiss hospitals the efficiency of hospitals is of interest to health insurers government authorities and hospital management itself however econometric methods for determining in efficiency have severe drawbacks since hospitals are multiproduct firms and because the duality between production and cost functions cannot be assumed in this work non parametric deterministic data envelopment analysis dea is used to measure the relative inefficiency of 89 swiss hospitals covering the years 1993 1996 310 observations special attention is given to the role of patient days in the production of health the findings depend on whether patient days are viewed as an input of patient time or as an output as in previous studies while the probability of a unit being inefficient cannot be explained using the available data the degree of overall inefficiency is shown to significantly depend on the financial incentives faced by management in particular due to subsidization private hospitals do not seem to be less inefficien

the efficiency of immunization of infants by local government the paper makes use of data envelopment analysis dea to measure the cost and production efficiency of local government programmemes for childhood immunization in urban and rural settings in australia model specification is tested for validity methods are used for ranking efficient units and advanced statistical methods are used to establish confidence intervals around the efficiency estimates given the small data set the cost and production models are valid and it is concluded that while neither urban nor rural programmes are particularly efficient there is more room for improvement in rural programmes ways of changing methods of delivery are suggested which may increase efficiency

executive budget proposal executive veto legislative override and uncertainty a comparative analysis of the budgetary process this study examines the roles of the executive budgetary proposal the executive veto the legislative override and legislative uncertainty about the executive s preferences in determining the outcome of a budgetary process a sequential model of the budgetary process with three institutional agents a legislature an appropriations committee and an executive is presented to focus attention on the executive proposal the veto the override provision and uncertainty simplifying assumptions are made 1 the appropriations committee has monopoly agenda power and 2 there is a closed amendment control rule in order to characterize sequential equilibria of various combinations of veto rules and override provisions we examine a particular arrangement of agents preferences and a two item budget the results demonstrate that the final budget depends critically on the executive proposal the executive veto rule the override provision and the uncertainty we achieve three striking results first the executive proposal may be effective in reducing the frequency of the exercised veto second for a given override provision a movement from the item veto to the item reduction veto leaves the executive worse off in some cases third with the same change in institutions the government budget may increase

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