modelling long run scenarios this paper intends to draw overall lessons from a long term study on co2 emission in france a country with a rather low energy gdp ration and in which transition to non fossil based production of electricity has been achieved more generally it points out the importance of possible bifurcation effects and draws methodological and policy implications from these statements it discusses modelling approaches to the linkages between energy and the rest of economy and addresses the issue of difficulties in cost assessment analysis in the presence of several baseline scenarios finally it proposes a more encompassing definition of no regrets policies

forward looking assessment of the ghg abatement cost application to china abstract evaluation of abatement costs is critical in setting reduction goals and devising climate policy however reliable forward looking assessment of the short term effects of climate policy remains a major challenge using panel data of 30 chinese provinces during 1997 2015 we first estimate the marginal co2 abatement costs using a novel data driven approach convex quantile regression based on the marginal abatement cost estimates and china s plans regarding carbon intensity reduction and economic growth we present a forward looking assessment of the abatement costs for chinese provinces for 2016 2020 our main finding is that all the chinese provinces have a negative abatement cost which means these provinces can benefit from an increase in the absolute level of co2 emissions despite the constraint on carbon intensity the magnitudes of economic benefits exhibit a significant regional disparity because some provinces can increase more co2 emissions than others however there is still costly carbon intensity abatement relative to a counterfactual where the provinces meet their economic growth targets but in the absence of the intensity reduction constraints policy implications have been proposed to enhance the efficiency and fairness of climate policy in china

the role of energy in productivity growth the objective of this paper is to analyze the role of energy in the growth of productivity the special significance of energy in economic growth was first established in the classic study energy and the american economy 1850 1975 by sam schurr and his associates 1960 at resources for the future for the period from 1920 to 1955 schurr noted that energy intensity of production had fallen while both labor and total factor productivity were rising the simultaneous decline in energy intensity and labor intensity of production ruled out the possibility of explaining the growth of productivity solely on the basis of substitution of less expensive energy for more expensive labor since the quantity of both energy and labor inputs required for a given level of output had been reduced technical change is also a critical explanatory factor an alternative explanation for growth of output with declining energy and labor intensity required an examination of the character of technical change this examination was motivated by the fact that from 1920 to 1955 the utilization of electricity had expanded by a factor of more than ten while consumption of all other forms of energy only doubled the two key features of technical change during this period were that the thermal efficiency of conversion of fuels into electricity increased by a factor of three and that the unusual characteristics of electricity had made it possible to perform tasks in altogether different ways than if the fuels had to be used directly schurr 1983 p 3 schurr 1982 has recently extended the analysis of energy and the american economy through 1981 for the period through 1969 his conclusions are as follows although the inverse relationship between total factor productivity and energy intensity virtually disappeared during the 1953 1969 period it is still noteworthy that high rates of improvement in total factor productivity were essentially not associated with increases in energy intensity 1982 p 6 schurr 1982 has analyzed the experience of the u s economy in the aftermath of the oil embargo of 1973 he points out that energy intensity of production has fallen steadily since 1973 and that the rate of decline accelerated sharply after the second oil price shock in 1979 following the iranian revolution he goes on to point out that

does opec influence crude oil prices testing for co movements and causality between regional crude oil prices using high frequency data the co movements among crude oil prices are analysed in order to address the question of regionalization of the world crude oil market time series econometrics in the form of error correction modelling is applied for daily crude oil price data covering the time period 1988 to 2004 and in this framework topics like weak and strong exogeneity among three major oil prices represented by brent opec and texas wti are addressed the empirical results are that causality is most likely bi directional among these crude oil prices and hence rejecting a regionalization hypothesis of the global oil market and also an influence from the opec oil price towards bent and wti which are usually claimed to have a benchmark role

firm incentives to promote technological change in pollution control reply abstract the process of technological change in pollution control is broken into three basic steps innovation diffusion and optimal agency response firm incentives to promote these steps are then examined under five regulatory regimes direct controls emission subsidies emission taxes free marketable permits and auctioned marketable permits on a relative basis emission taxes and auctioned permits provide the highest firm incentives to promote technological change at times free permits generate lower incentives direct controls which are common regulatory tools usually provide the lowest relative firm incentives to promote technological change

testing the stochastic structure of production a flexible moment based approach conventional production function specifications are shown to impose restrictions on the probability distribution of output that cannot be tested with the conventional models these restrictions have important implications for firm behavior under uncertainty a flexible representation of a firm s stochastic technology is developed based on the moments of the probability distribution of output these moments are a unique representation of the technology and are functions of inputs large sample estimators are developed for a linear moment model that is sufficiently flexible to test the restrictions implied by conventional production function specifications the flexible moment based approach is applied to milk production data the first three moments of output are statistically significant functions of inputs the cross moment restrictions implied by conventional models are rejected

evaluating us state police performance using data envelopment analysis abstract in this paper we evaluate the efficiency of state police services in the continental united states using a multiple stage data envelopment analysis model using multiple inputs and multiple outputs to characterize police service provision technical and scale efficiency are calculated for the 49 continental states given the complex nature of service provision we allow for environmental factors of production and control for these non discretionary inputs our results indicate that most states are technically efficient but nearly half are operating at less than optimal scale size

the impact of electric power on productivity according to the historical record the increased use of energy in general and electric power in particular stands as one of the key factors in productivity growth growth accountants however find little support for this view rejecting claims that the productivity slowdown can be attributed to the lower rate of growth of the energy input in us manufacturing in this study an attempt at reconciling the historical record with the empirical facts is made specifically the commonly used factor income shares in the relevant divisia input growth index are replaced by the estimated output input elasticities the latter attribute a considerably larger role to electric power than previous studies indicated these are then used to reevaluate the sources of growth in us manufacturing

operational research in education operational research or techniques have been applied from the early stages of the discipline to a wide variety of issues in education at the government level these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions how to measure it and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings local governments as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation may also need to make decisions regarding for example the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones as well as the day to day logistics of getting pupils to schools issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses this survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government managers and consumers of education and the or techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

approaches to efficient capital taxation leveling the playing field vs living by the golden rule this paper analyzes intersectoral and intertemporal efficiency effects of the tax reform act of 1986 using a general equilibrium model that considers impacts of taxes on the allocation of capital across industries assets sectors and time the model pays close attentiona to capital adjustment dynamics we find that the 1986 reform worsened the intertemporal efficiency of resource allocation by increasing marginal effective tax rates on various uses and types of capital this negative efficiency effect is more that offset however by postivie effects from an improved intersectoral allocation of capital and a reduction of labor market distortions

the demand for capital labor and energy in european manufacturing industry before and after the oil price shocks the price and substitution elasticities for factor inputs capital labor fuels and electricity are estimated for total manufacturing industry on the basis of a pooled crosscountry time series analysis for nine west european countries the impact of the economic disturbances in the 1970s on the price sensitivity of demand is analyzed by estimating a translog cost function for two separate periods 1960 72 and 1973 80 hicks neutral technical change is rejected for both periods the results indicate some quite significant changes in the elasticities over the two periods

a dynamic stochastic frontier model to evaluate regional financial efficiency evidence from chinese county level panel data abstract studies have widely used stochastic frontier models to assess financial efficiency however traditional static approaches do not take dynamic characteristics of financial systems into account this article develops a dynamic stochastic frontier model to evaluate regional financial efficiency and provides an empirical test of the model by using panel data of 62 chinese counties during the 2001 2010 period the model measures the dynamic impact of the input output variables and environmental variables on financial efficiency and allows for the separation of technical change from the change in technical efficiency the results show that the dynamic model provides a better fit to the data than the static model in addition a gradient difference emerges in the regional financial efficiency among the six major regions of china the results offer practical implications for the development of regional financial services in china as well as other developing countries and emerging economies

risk efficiency and the adoption of modern crop varieties evidence from the philippines efficiency among farmers of less developed countries has been the focus of numerous studies since t w schultz hypothesized that farmers in developing agricultures are poor but efficient 1 a growing body of literature supports schultz s argument that farmers in developing agricultures have low incomes not because they use their resources inefficiently but because they lack the technology and resources they need to realize higher productivity and thus higher incomes a high priority in agricultural development assistance since the 1960s has been the generation of technology that would enable farmers to increase their productivity much research has been devoted to the causes of low agricultural productivity and the longer term productivity gains that may be forthcoming from modern technology but less attention has been devoted to the process of technology adoption by low income farmers as noted in the recent survey of adoption of agricultural innovations by g feder r e just and d zilberman there have been efforts to model adoption in the context of risk but there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the ways that farmers respond over time as a new production technology is introduced in a risky environment 2 in this article we address the empirical analysis of technical efficiency as farmers adopt new production technology taking into account production risk and learning we utilize recently developed efficiency criteria applicable when production is risky and implement these criteria using an approximation to a representative farmer s decision model 3 pooled time series and cross sectional data collected by the international rice research institute are used to investigate the

malmquist productivity index estimation with zero value variables the case of greek prefectural training councils abstract the paper suggests a technique for the parametric estimation of the malmquist productivity growth index when the dataset to be analyzed contains a considerable number of observations with zero values a dummy variable technique suggested by battese j agric econom 48 1997 250 is extended to a translog specification of the input distance function moreover technical changes tcs are decomposed into neutral and biased components and the sources of total productivity growth are computed via formulae explicitly accounting for the discrete nature of the data our approach has been applied to the greek prefectural training councils a state extension system for the general public findings indicate a considerably negative productivity growth primarily attributable to regressive tc

heterogeneous noncompliance with opec s oil production cuts abstract in this study we explore the heterogeneous noncompliance behavior among ten member nations of the organization of the petroleum countries opec overall we find that the three top oil producers saudi arabia iran and venezuela and the four relatively low oil producers libya indonesia algeria and qatar exhibit higher cheating frequencies and magnitudes while they tend to offset their peers conduct conversely the three mid oil producers uae nigeria and kuwait display much lower frequencies and magnitudes of noncompliance with opec s administered quotas while they largely demonstrate herding behavior among their peers the volatilities of the respective cheating magnitudes are rather similar across the three clusters though this study contributes to the economic literature by further illuminating the operational mode of opec and by exposing its three main subsets its interdependent structure and its members customary behavioral patterns

a unified world oil market regions in physical economic geographic and political space although there is a general consensus that the market is unified here we quantify the factors that create regions by analyzing the price relation between 33 crude oils adf statistics indicate that 447 of the 528 crude oil pairings cointegrate 81 do not the presence absence of cointegration is analyzed using a logit model the likelihood that the prices for two crude oils cointegrate depends on their physical characteristics density and sulfur content economic factors country risk for the nation of origin their geographic location distance between supply ports and political factors opec membership over the sample period the technology to refine heavy crude oils penetrates the market and this reduces the price difference between heavy and light crude oils the effect of country risk implies that crude oils from high risk nations are not perfect substitutes for crude oils of similar quality from low risk nations finally crude oils from widely separated suppliers are more likely to cointegrate than crude oils from near by nations which suggests consumers diversify supply across transportation chokepoints for this sample these sources of regionalization add 0 20 per barrel to the 2 86 average price difference between crude oils in the same market together these factors have important implications for the efficacy of policy aimed at reducing dependence on unreliable suppliers and the spill over effects of holding inventories

microfoundations for stochastic frontiers the purpose of the paper is to propose microfoundations for stochastic frontier models previous work shows that a simple bayesian learning model supports gamma distributions for technical inefficiency in stochastic frontier models the conclusion depends on how the problem is formulated and what assumptions are made about the sampling process and the prior after the new formulation of the problem it turns out that the distribution of the one sided error component does not belong to a known family moreover we find that without specifying a utility function or even the cost inefficiency function the relative effectiveness of managerial input can be determined using only cost data and estimates of the returns to scale the point of this construction is that features of the inefficiency function u z can be recovered from the data based on the solid microfoundation of expected utility of profit maximization but the model does not make a prediction about the distribution

finite mixture estimation of multiproduct cost functions this paper presents a technique of cost function estimation based on the theory of finite mixture distributions which allows for the simultaneous existence of multiple technologies of production when the researcher does not know which observations correspond to which technologies the finite mixture technique provides estimates of the proportions of firms using the various technologies facilitates comparisons between technologies and preserves the traditional interpretations of cost estimation after describing the mixture procedure the technique is illustrated on a large sample of savings and loan associations and it is concluded that this industry exhibits multiple technologies of production copyright 1991 by mit press

modeling production for general equilibrium analysis the purpose of this paper is to present econometric models of producer behavior suitable for incorporation into a general equilibrium model implementation of these models requires a time series of inter industry transactions tables second implementation requires methods for estimation of parameters in systems of nonlinear simultaneous equations finally the economic theory of producer behavior implies equality and inequality restrictions on the parameters that must be incorporated into the estimation we discuss an empirical application to modeling producer behavior in thirty six industrial sectors of the u s economy

evaluating u s oil security and import reliance abstract we examine the literature that considers the consequences of u s reliance on imported oil we take an approach that covers many ideas about the costs arising from u s reliance on imported oil and we identify which of those ideas have broad support in the economics literature and which ideas have only limited support we also quantify the costs of u s reliance on imported oil using two approaches one is fairly narrow conforms to the economics view of externalities and yields small cost estimates the other is relatively expansive is favored by some policy analysts and yields much larger cost estimates we estimate these costs as expected u s economic losses over a time horizon from 2010 through 2035 while taking into account world oil market conditions market power probable oil supply disruptions and the oil market response to those supply disruptions

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

the dynamics of crude oil price differentials abstract crude oil price differentials are modelled as a two regime threshold autoregressive tar process using the method proposed by caner and hansen caner m hansen b e threshold autoregression with a unit root econometrica 2001 69 1555 1596 while standard unit root tests suggest that the prices of crude oil of different varieties move closely together such that their price differential is stationary the tar results indicate strong evidence of threshold effects in the adjustment process to the long run equilibrium these findings suggest that crude oil prices are linked and thus at the very general level the oil market is one great pool adelman m a international oil agreements the energy journal 1984 5 1 9 however differences in the dynamics of adjustment suggest that within this one pool oil markets are not necessarily integrated in every time period and hence the dynamics of crude oil price differentials may not follow a stationary process at all times although the development of a liquid futures market around the crude oil benchmarks has helped make some distant markets more unified arbitrage is not costless or risk free and temporary breakdowns in the benchmarks can lead to decoupling of crude oil prices

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

aggregate consumer behaviour and the measurement of inequality this paper presents an approach to inequality measurement based on an econometric model of aggregate consumer behaviour the novel feature of this model is that systems of individual demand functions can be recovered uniquely from the system of aggregate demand functions we present methods for evaluating social welfare based on an explicit social welfare function this social welfare function incorporates measures of individual welfare based on indirect utility functions for all consumer units we develop indexes of inequality based on actual and potential levels of social welfare

physical market determinants of the price of crude oil and the market premium abstract we analyze the determinants of the real price of crude oil by means of an equilibrium correction model over the last two decades where we focus on the aspects of the physical market that impact on the clearing price we find that two cointegrating relations affect the changes in prices one refers to opec s behavior attempting to control prices using its market power and quotas the other to the coverage rate of oecd expected future demand using inventory behaviors we derive a forecasting equation for the change in oil prices which we use to assess the speculative elements of the price increases of the period 2000 05 we show that worries alien to the physical markets were the causes of the increase in oil prices and we quantify their overall impact

the hotspots reference routes and research trends of marginal abatement costs a systematic review abstract as one of the most effective means of evaluating environmental policies marginal abatement costs macs have been adopted in a growing body of research this study characterizes the mac related literature from 1993 to 2018 on web of science based on a systematic review bibliometric analysis and mind mapping the results classify the research hotspots into influential factors methods and empirical applications the three most frequently mentioned influential factors are technical change discount rates and energy prices compared with top down models bottom up models including engineering model and expert based method are the most widely used improvements in the former focus on strengthening market behavior effect while those in the latter aim to overcome the weaknesses of negative costs and lack of interaction across measures mac applications focus on environmental policies with two new research areas recently emerging co benefits and sectoral abatement costs furthermore a reference route is proposed by summarizing the applicability of methods and matching relationships among influential factors methods and empirical problems finally potential research directions are summarized based on the identified research hotspots and a similar co word analysis in marginal cost field such as considering the effects of both multiple influential factors and the interaction among factors on maccs

co2 emission abatement cost and its decomposition a directional distance function approach accurately estimating carbon dioxide co2 abatement costs and effectively identifying the factors impacting those costs can improve the applicability and effectiveness of policy implementation this paper proposes a new method to estimate co2 abatement costs cac based on the directional distance function the method theoretically decomposes cac into carbon productivity and output elasticity of substitutions this decomposition can identify the types of cac the method also investigates the effects of development mode selection on cac by selecting different directional vectors following the theoretical discussion an empirical study is presented focusing on high energy consumption firms in the united states u s the results were as follows 1 in sustainable development mode changes in the average cac of all firms were caused both by carbon productivity and output elasticity of substitution carbon productivity dominated cac differences among different firm types 2 in general the amelioration potential of firm technology and environmental management was gradually explored by firms during sample period corresponding environmental regulatory strategies are needed for firms with different cac characteristics 3 firms selecting different development modes will realize significant differences in cac firms in the sustainable development mode had the highest cac levels however this mode was best for achieving a win win between economic benefits and environmental protection

systematic departures from the frontier a framework for the analysis of firm inefficiency departures from a production or cost frontier may reflect the systematic effect of conditions that contribute to inefficiency to test whether some portion of frontier function departures can be systematically explained the frontier inefficiency error component is modeled as a function of various causal factors and a random component the functional form of the inefficiency error term model is chosen to assure strict one sidedness preliminary empirical results generated from electric utility data suggest the superiority of including both systematic and random components in the inefficiency error term

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

heteroscedasticity or production risk a synthetic view two veins of literature namely production risk literature and stochastic frontier analysis are examined both fields are concerned of output variation the former due to exogenous shocks the latter due inefficiency by covering the literature from both the fields this review suggests that the concept of heteroscedasticity can be utilized to build a synthesis between these mainly separate branches of literature however the synthetic approach brings a challenge how to differentiate between different sources of output variation this challenge is identified as the main obstacle to meaningfully combine the two approaches

welfare comparison under exact aggregation new econometric model of aggregate consumer behavior in the united states and to apply this model to the analysis of impacts of alternative economic policies on the welfare of individual consuming units the model incorporates time series data on quantities consumed prices the level and distribution of income and demographic characteristics of the population it also incorporates cross section data on the allocation of consumer expenditures for households with different demographic characteristics our econometric model is based on the theory of exact aggregation developed by lau 1977a c this theory makes it possible to dispense with the notion of a representative consumer in constructing models of aggregate consumer behavior one of the most remarkable implications of lau s theory of exact aggregation is that systems of demand functions for individuals with common demographic characteristics can be recovered uniquely from the system of aggregate demand functions using the individual demand functions we can analyze the impact of economic policy on consumer welfare

allocation of pollution abatement under learning by doing abstract this paper examines how learning by doing affects the allocation of pollution abatement between heterogeneous technologies over time the optimal policy balances current abatement costs against reductions in future costs and infant technologies may be preferred to mature technologies despite greater initial costs we characterize when a technological winner might emerge and we identify conditions under which optimal abatement is shared across all technologies pigouvian taxes can implement the first best but may need to be differentiated across technologies when technical change is induced an important role of environmental policies is to put abatement on the right technological trajectories

estimating the shadow prices of so2 and nox for u s coal power plants a convex nonparametric least squares approach abstract weak disposability between outputs and pollutants defined as a simultaneous proportional reduction of both outputs and pollutants assumes that pollutants are byproducts of the output generation process and that a firm can freely dispose of both by scaling down production levels leaving some inputs idle based on the production axioms of monotonicity convexity and weak disposability we formulate a convex nonparametric least squares cnls quadratic optimization problem to estimate a frontier production function assuming either a deterministic disturbance term consisting only of inefficiency or a composite disturbance term composed of both inefficiency and noise the suggested methodology extends the stochastic semi nonparametric envelopment of data stoned described in kuosmanen and kortelainen 2011 applying the method to estimate the shadow prices of so 2 and no x generated by u s coal power plants we conclude that the weak disposability stoned method provides more consistent estimates of market prices

measuring stochastic technology the case of tulare milk production the flexible moment based approach to production analysis is used to measure the stochastic structure of large scale dairy production in tulare county california this approach is flexible because it does not impose restrictions on the relationships between decision variables and the moments of the probability distribution of output the parameter estimates support the hypothesis that second and third moments are functions of inputs and indicate that capital intensive dairies are riskier the implied behavior of a risk averse dairy manager changed markedly when the effects of inputs on the skewness of the output distribution were included in a decision model

the shadow prices of co2 and so2 for chinese coal fired power plants a partial frontier approach abstract shadow prices are widely employed in guiding environmental policies this paper contributes to the literature by developing a novel partial frontier approach for estimating shadow prices the proposed method is advanced in handling outliers and provides a precise estimation of the marginal rate of substitution along the production frontier to cope with the different disposability characteristics of undesirable emissions so2 is treated as an environmental input that is strongly disposable because most different undesirable outputs are jointly reduced this study is the first to use directional derivatives instead of partial derivatives and proposes a new separation method that separates individual directional shadow price from the cost of joint reduction of multiple undesirable outputs we apply the proposed method to a sample of 93 coal fired power plants covering six years the estimated average shadow prices of co2 and so2 are 69 tonne and 2525 tonne under the newly developed partial frontiers when assuming some undesirable output to be strongly disposable both shadow prices fall 20 32 tonne and 1018 23 tonne the present paper suggests the estimated shadow prices will be much different across different levels of disposability the cost of joint reduction is calculated as 91 05 unit given the current production level which leads to a directional shadow price for the two undesirable outputs of 91 32 tonne and 1250 06 tonne the estimated shadow prices for both undesirable outputs dispersed widely under the partial frontiers spatial distribution of estimated shadow prices shows that coastal provinces and municipalities have higher co2 shadow prices but lower so2 shadow prices whereas the northeast provinces are the opposite the co2 shadow price is comparatively stable over the study period while the so2 shadow price fluctuates policy implications are discussed

banks efficiency and credit risk analysis using by production approach the case of iranian banks abstractthis article uses a by production approach that integrates credit risk to monitor bank efficiency the method overcomes the possible misspecification issues of the commonly assumed weak disposability wda of undesirable outputs in addition our measure extends the classic by production approach by including statistical aspects through subsampling techniques we have also provided an algorithm to correct related infeasibilities using this approach we investigate the performance of iranian banks and credit risk management in the sector for the period 1998 2012 non performing loans npls have been used as an undesirable output and proxy for credit risk in our models based on our empirical results although the banks generally exhibited efficiency improvements over time their credit risk performance deteriorated considerably after the regulatory changes introduced in 2005 these findings confirm that credit quality can be monitored more actively across iranian banks

stochastic semi nonparametric frontier estimation of electricity distribution networks application of the stoned method in the finnish regulatory model abstract electricity distribution network is a prime example of a natural local monopoly in many countries electricity distribution is regulated by the government many regulators apply frontier estimation techniques such as data envelopment analysis dea or stochastic frontier analysis sfa as an integral part of their regulatory framework while more advanced methods that combine nonparametric frontier with stochastic error term are known in the literature in practice regulators continue to apply simplistic methods this paper reports the main results of the project commissioned by the finnish regulator for further development of the cost frontier estimation in their regulatory framework the key objectives of the project were to integrate a stochastic sfa style noise term to the nonparametric axiomatic dea style cost frontier and to take the heterogeneity of firms and their operating environments better into account to achieve these objectives a new method called stochastic nonparametric envelopment of data stoned was examined based on the insights and experiences gained in the empirical analysis using the real data of the regulated networks the finnish regulator adopted the stoned method in use from 2012 onwards

the welfare cost of capital income taxation in a growing economy the welfare cost of capital income taxation is analyzed in a general equilibrium framework where the private sector is represented by a competitive household endowed with perfect foresight and an infinite life the value of the welfare cost depends essentially on the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the production function numerical estimates are presented for different values of the parameters of the model the welfare gain obtained by the abolition of the capital income tax is smaller when the private sector is not endowed with perfect foresight it is reduced by about 40 percent when expectations are myopic the allocation efficiency cost of the corporate tax dwarfs the intertemporal welfare cost

measuring and assessing capacity utilization in the manufacturing sectors of nine oecd countries following a tradition established by cassels klein and hickman we employ the economic theory of cost and production and define economic capacity output as that output at which short and long run average total cost curves are tangent to one another capacity utilization cu rates are then computed as the ratio of actual to capacity output we implement this framework empirically by specifying and estimating a translog variable cost function for the manufacturing sectors of nine oecd countries we find that by the end of the historical sample the early 1980s pervasive and chronic excess capacity exists while the average cost consequence of excess capacity was relatively modest in the 1960s the burden increased considerably after opec i and after opec ii the premium was as large as 15 of average total costs we also find that electricity and fuel price increases had small impacts on capacity output relative to that from labor or capital finally we adjust conventional measures of multifactor productivity growth for changes in cu and find that the adjusted growth is larger after 1973 than that based on traditional procedures

capital and the theory of productivity measurement the purpose of this paper is twofold to provide a brief survey of recent approaches to the measurement of total factor productivity and to comment on some of the special problems which are associated with capital thus in sections i iv below four approaches to the measurement of total factor productivity are outlined while section v compares and contrasts the approaches in section vi i consider how the various approaches have to be modified when welldefined rental markets for components of the capital stock do not exist the usual case

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency in their comment subhash c ray and evangelia desli 1997 hereafter rd point out that the specification of the decomposition of the malmquist productivity index used by fare et al 1994 hereafter fgnz is not unique and propose and compute an alternative specification of that decomposition we will discuss additional decompositions at the end of this note but proceed here by comparing the rd decomposition with fgnz based on both conceptual and computational grounds rd provide a discussion of the overall malmquist productivity index including the important issue of when this index is equivalent to the traditional notion of total factor productivity tfp namely under the condition that the reference technology be consistent with constant returns to scale crs as they point out this will yield a measure of tfp even if the true underlying technology is not crs for example both rd and fgnz use the crs reference technology to compute overall malmquist productivity one of the key issues raised is the role of the underlying scale properties of the benchmark technologies used to define and compute both productivity and its components in particular two reference technologies are employed in both rd and fgnz what we refer to as crs and variable returns to scale vrs technologies by construction these technologies are nested the crs technology contains the vrs technology as in figure 1 in rd this nestedness provides the logical basis for our decomposition at a very intuitive level we would argue that these two benchmarks can be used to provide bounds on the underlying true but unknown technology 2 intuitively we see the vrs technology providing a type of convex inner approximation whereas the crs technology provides a type of convex outer approximation thus these two technologies provide alternative benchmarks they do not require that the data satisfy either crs or vrs another possible intuitive interpretation is that the crs captures a perhaps hypothetical long run and the vrs approximates the short run as a reference technology the crs technology has some very useful features for example it captures the notion of maximal

pseudolikelihood estimation of the stochastic frontier model stochastic frontier analysis is a popular tool to assess firm performance almost universally it has been applied using maximum likelihood ml estimation an alternative approach pseudolikelihood

stochastic data envelopment analysis a review abstract this paper provides a review of stochastic data envelopment analysis dea we discuss extensions of deterministic dea in three directions i deviations from the deterministic frontier are modeled as stochastic variables ii random noise in terms of measurement errors sample noise and specification errors is made an integral part of the model and iii the frontier is stochastic as is the underlying production possibility set pps stochastic dea utilizes non parametric convex or conical hull reference technologies based upon axioms from production theory accompanied by a statistical foundation in terms of axioms from statistics or distributional assumptions the approaches allow for an estimation of stochastic inefficiency compared to a deterministic or a stochastic pps and for statistical inference while maintaining an axiomatic foundation focus is on bridges and differences between approaches within the field of stochastic dea including semi parametric stochastic frontier analysis sfa and chance constrained dea ccdea we argue that statistical inference based upon homogenous bootstrapping in contrast to a management science approach imposes a restrictive structure on inefficiency which may not facilitate the communication of results of the analysis to decision makers semi parametric sfa and ccdea differ w r t the modeling of noise and stochastic inefficiency the two approaches are in spite of the inherent differences shown to be complements in the sense that the stochastic ppss obtained by the two approaches share basic similarities in the case of one output and multiple inputs recent contributions related to i disentangling of random noise and random inefficiency and ii obtaining smooth shape constrained estimators of the frontier are discussed

energy prices and productivity growth the sharp decline in economic growth since 1973 presents a problem comparable in scientific interest and social importance to the problem of unemployment in the great depression of the 1930s conventional methods of economic analysis have been tried and have been found to be inadequate this paper outlines a new framework for understanding the slowdown in economic growth we find that the fall in u s economic growth since 1973 has been due to the dramatic decline in productivity growth within the new framework we identify higher energy prices as an important determinant of the productivity slowdown

technical change and the marginal cost of abatement abstract we address one aspect of the treatment of technical change in the environmental economics literature how technical change impacts the marginal cost of abatement we review a selection of papers that employ a variety of representations of technical change and show that these representations have quite different and sometimes surprising effects on the marginal costs of pollution reductions we argue that these varied representations in fact correspond to a variety of different technology options we then present results indicating that this representation matters the impacts of technical change on the marginal cost of abatement can crucially impact policy analysis

government expenditure and economic growth in the developed countries 1952 76 in the past decade or more the pace of economic growth has slowed considerably and the share of government expenditure in national product has increased considerably the average annual growth rate of per capita gdp for the 16 most important developed market economies was 6 3 from 1955 73 and 2 0 from 1973 79 the average share of government in gdp went from 27 in 1955 to 34 in 1970 to 43 in 1979 2 the simple correlation proves nothing but it suggests the growth of government might be one of the causes of the slowdown many economists have theorized that government production is staticly less efficient than private sector production with competitive markets see

decomposition of the fisher ideal index of productivity a non parametric dual analysis of us airlines data in this paper we offer a non parametric method of decomposing the fisher ideal index of productivity into individual factors measuring i technical efficiency change ii allocative efficiency change iii shift in the cost function iv scale economies due to output change and v an adjustment factor reflecting change in the output attributes cross section data from the us airline industry for the years i 983 and i 984 are utilised in an empirical application illustrating this method the rate of multifactor productivity growth mfpg over time in the single output multiple input case can be measured by the difference in the rates of growth in the quantity of output and the divisia index of input quantity when no technical inefficiency exists this rate of mfpg can be decomposed into two additive components i the rate of technical change measuring the rate of change in the volume of output holding the input bundle unchanged and ii a returns to scale effect showing change in productivity with changes in the input quantities without technical change when technical efficiency varies over time a part of the measured rate of mfpg would be due to efficiency

pollution abatement activities and traditional productivity abstract this study models the joint production of good and bad output production and calculates traditional productivity when bad output production is regulated and when it is unregulated we apply this model to data for u s coal fired electric power plants for 1985 1995 and compare rates of productivity and technical change to gain an understanding of the association between pollution abatement activities and traditional rates of productivity and technical change while traditional productivity and technical change associated with abatement activities decline we conclude they are not statistically significant

the efficiency gains from dynamic tax reform this paper presents a new simulation methodology for determining the pure efficiency gains from tax reform along the general equilibrium rational expectations growth path of life cycle economies the principal findings concern the effects of switching from a proportional income tax with rates similar to those in the u s to either a proportional tax on consumption or a proportional tax on labor income a switch to consumption taxation generates a sustainable welfare gain of almost 2 percent of lifetime resources in contrast a transition to wage taxation generates a loss of greater than percent of lifetime re sources a second general result is that even a mild degree of progressivity in the income tax system imposes a very large efficiency cost this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

tax policy and capital allocation summary the purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of u s tax policy on the efficiency of capital allocation to achieve this objective we employ an intertemporal general equilibrium model of the u s economy implemented econometrically for annual data covering the period 1955 1980 we present a detailed model of the provisions of u s tax law applicable to income from capital we use intertemporal equilibrium paths corresponding to alternative tax policies to evaluate proposals for tax reform we find that dramatic gains in economic welfare would result from a shift from direct to indirect taxation

the incidence of taxes a dynamic macroeconomic analysis abstract this paper analyzes the incidence of various tax changes using the intertemporal optimizing framework developed by brock and turnovsky the model contains a reasonably complete specification of the corporate sector in which firms have the choice of financial structure it also allows for a range of government financial policies although only one is considered in detail both the short run and the long run effects of changes in the personal income capital gains and corporate profit tax rates are analyzed it is shown that the effects of tax changes a vary between the short and long run b the effects of tax changes depend critically upon the financial structure adopted by forms and c may also depend upon government financial policy

risk preferences production risk and firm heterogeneity a new technique is proposed for deriving the risk preference function under production risk and expected utility of profit maximization the derivation depends on neither a specific parametric form of the utility function nor any distribution of the error term representing production risk the proposed risk preference function is flexible enough to test different types of risk behavior and symmetry of the output distribution furthermore our production risk specification allows for inputs with positive and negative marginal risk the econometric model accommodates production risk risk preferences and firm heterogeneity simultaneously norwegian salmon farming data are used as an application

oil prices speculation and fundamentals interpreting causal relations among spot and futures prices abstract a consensus that the world oil market is unified begs the question where do innovations in oil prices enter the market here we investigate where changes in the price of crude oil originate and how they spread by examining causal relationships among prices for crude oils from north america europe africa and the middle east on both spot and futures markets results indicate that innovations first appear in spot prices for dubai fateh and spread to other spot and futures prices while other innovations first appear in the far month contract for west texas intermediate and spread to other exchanges and contracts links between spot and futures markets are relatively weak and this may have allowed the long run relationship between spot and future prices to change after september 2004 together these results suggest that market fundamentals initiated a long term increase in oil prices that was exacerbated by speculators who recognized an increase in the probability that oil prices would rise over time

the applicability of marginal abatement cost approach a comprehensive review abstract the marginal abatement cost mac methodology is widely used in climate change policies policy makers rely on mac to assess feasible strategies and related costs to achieve emission reduction goals this paper introduces a variety of mac methodologies aiming at solving diverse problems which utilizes various calculable logic thus producing different results and implications this study applies a mind mapping method to capture differentiation of mac methods and systematically classify mac methodologies the applicability path analysis was proposed based on principles such as stakeholder type decision making objectives cost concept strategy mode and information scope our goal is to assess the applicability of different methodologies to reduce misuse by policy makers and to serve as a guide for subsequent research which might prompt and lead to the derivation of more consequential results in future studies the results of this study suggest that the complex method is not always better than the simplified method because policy makers are required to select the appropriate method according to the type of information needed it may even be suggested that mac could be reliable by ranking relative value of options compared with baseline rather than focusing on the absolute value of individual measures

how do crude oil prices co move a copula approach abstract this paper examines the dependence structure between crude oil benchmark prices using copulas by considering several copula models with different conditional dependence structures and time varying dependence parameters we find evidence of significant symmetric upper and lower tail dependence between crude oil prices these findings suggest that crude oil prices are linked with the same intensity during bull and bear markets thus supporting the hypothesis that the oil market is one great pool in contrast with the hypothesis that states that the oil market is regionalized our findings on crude oil price co movements also have implications for risk management hedging strategies and asset pricing

efficiency measurement in the stochastic frontier model abstract deterministic models of technical efficiency assume that all deviations from the production frontier are due to inefficiency critics argue that no allowance is made for measurement error and other statistical noise so that the resulting efficiency measure will be contaminated the stochastic frontier model is an alternative that allows both inefficiency and measurement error advocates argue that the stochastic frontier models should be used despite other potential limitations because of the superior conceptual treatment of noise as will be demonstrated in this paper however the assumed shape of the error distributions is used to identify a key production function parameter therefore the stochastic frontier models like the deterministic models cannot produce absolute measures of efficiency moreover we show that rankings for firm specific inefficiency estimates produced by traditional stochastic frontier models do not change from the rankings of the composed errors as a result the performance of the deterministic models is qualitatively similar to that of the stochastic frontier models

measuring oil supply disruptions a historical perspective abstract an oil supply disruption in opec member countries or in the persian gulf region may have unusually large effects on crude oil prices because such a disruption may escalate into wider disruptions within these volatile regions this analysis reviews and updates several past studies to identify specific events that can be linked to oil supply shocks that remove oil production while increasing world oil prices using historical data it finds that a 10 cut in world oil supplies arising from abrupt and large monthly disruptions of opec and persian gulf crude oil production correlates with a 35 43 increase in inflation adjusted crude oil prices the data also reveal that almost all sudden and large oil supply disruptions occurred prior to 2004 which raises some interesting issues about how to interpret the evidence from studies evaluating the impact of future oil disruptions on either prices or the economy

productivity and cost gaps in manufacturing industries in u s japan and germany abstract the objective of this paper is to measure and explain the development of differences in productivity for five manufacturing industries of the u s japan and germany changes in total factor productivities and differences in technologies and the sources of those changes will be analyzed we extend the framework developed by jorgenson and nishimizu 1978 to the dual cost approach to reflect the efficiency aspect of productivity gaps in terms of cost disadvantages we employ translog cost functions for a description of productivity and cost efficiency gaps and for an econometric analysis of sources of catching up processes

environmental efficiency and economic growth of china a ray slack based model analysis abstract the chinese economy has been experiencing rapid growth since the implementation of the reform and opening up policy however at the same time it faces issues regarding resource savings and environmental protection which are important aspects of the new industrialization therefore this study conducts data envelopment analysis dea to evaluate the environmental efficiency of chinese regions certain existing dea models account for undesirable outputs and do not elucidate the weak disposable relationship between undesirable and desirable outputs thus polar theory is introduced among the dea modeling in this study first drawing on stochastic frontier analysis ray stochastic frontier analysis and dea we propose a ray slack based model rsbm to evaluate provincial environmental efficiencies in china from 2004 to 2012 subsequently an rsbm malmquist luenberger total factor productivity index is structured finally economic growth environmental efficiency and energy consumption are analyzed using spatial panel econometrics as this study treats industrial waste as undesirable outputs the rsbm results show that the environmental efficiencies in the east are the highest while those in the central regions are the lowest the spatial econometric analysis reveals that the ratios of direct to total elasticity and those of direct to total effect for capital labor and energy input variables are fixed furthermore the study provides policy implications and suggestions for future research

substitutability among undesirable outputs in recent years economists have started to move beyond calculating regulatory effects on a pollutant by pollutant basis since their interaction is important in this study we take up this issue to allow for joint production of multiple pollutants and marketable output we specify our technology using a directional distance function this allows us to treat pollutants as joint outputs yet accounts for their undesirability we estimate the distance function for a sample of coal fired electric power plants from 1985 to 1998 which includes the first 4 years of phase i of the clean air act amendments of 1990 we focus on the interaction between so2 and no x as they became more highly regulated and estimate shadow prices of the pollutants and the morishima elasticity of transformation between two pollutants no x and so2 as well as with respect to the desirable output kilowatt hours of electricity as expected we find that power plants increase no x emissions as they decrease so2 i e they are subs

growth accounting with intermediate inputs and the transmission of technical change abstract the aggregate rate of total factor productivity growth tfpg when there are intermediate inputs can be expressed either as a weighted average or as a weighted sum of the sectoral rates depending on the choice of sectoral rates being weighted the agrument that there is a magnification effect due to the transmission of tfpg through the intersectoral flows among sectors is therefore to be more illusory than real

oil prices the role of refinery utilization futures markets and non linearities we test the hypothesis that real oil prices are determined in part by refinery capacity non linearities in supply conditions and or expectations and that observed changes in these variables can account for the rise in prices between 2004 and 2006 results indicate that the refining sector plays an important role in the recent price increase but not in the way described by many analysts the relationship is negative such that higher refinery utilization rates reduce crude oil prices this effect is associated with shifts in the production of heavy and light grades of crude oil and price spreads between them non linear relationships between opec capacity and oil prices as well as conditions on the futures markets also account for changes in real oil prices together these factors allow the model to generate a one step ahead out of sample forecast that performs as well as forecasts implied by far month contracts on the new york mercantile exchange and is able to account for much of the 27 rise in crude oil prices between 2004 and 2006

do overarching mitigation objectives dominate transport specific targets in the eu this research investigates if the stringent 2020 and 2050 overarching co2 mitigation objectives set out by the european union dominate its 2010 to 2020 targets specific to the transportation arena specifically its biofuel penetration objectives and gram co2per kilometre emission caps using a dynamic recursive general equilibrium model imaclim r we demonstrate that these overarching targets do not dominate the interim transportation targets when the carbon policy triggering compliance with the mitigation objectives boils down to the theoretical least cost option of uniform carbon pricing ground transportation is confirmed as quite insensitive to high carbon prices even when such prices are applied over a long term it is tempting to conclude that pursuing the mitigation objectives specific to transportation will impose unnecessary costs however because of the second best conditions prevailing in actual economies and of the risk of lock in in carbon intensive trajectories we conclude with the urgent need for some ambitious transport specific policy design research agenda

incorporating risk in production analysis risk is the farmer s perennial problem unfortunately agricultural economists have made little progress in analyzing or measuring production risk in ways that provide useful information for farm management therefore it is fair to say that the social returns to existing research on production risk are probably low it is from this perspective that i will discuss incorporating risk in production analysis my purpose is not to survey the literature or to catalog all the ways risk concepts have been incorporated in production models rather i intend to evaluate critically some of the basic concepts and approaches in the literature and to indicate the directions i believe research must take to arrive at a paradigm for incorporating risk in production analysis that could yield higher social returns in my view the conventional conceptual framework used for risk analysis has not led agricultural economists to ask the most important questions about the effects risk has on agricultural decision making the extension of the static neoclassical production model to incorporate price and production uncertainty has led agricultural economists to rationalize observed behavior in terms of the arrow pratt risk aversion concept this approach has led in turn to qualitative comparative static theorems which are appealing to theorists but have little relation to the decision problems farmers face to increase the relevance of their models and methods i believe agricultural economists need to understand specifically how risk affects agricultural production this in turn will suggest how risk affects agricultural decision making and why farmers are or should be concerned with it my analysis of these issues leads me to discount the hypothesis that risk matters primarily because of the psychic disutility it causes rather i hypothesize that risk matters primarily because production is a dynamic phenomenon and therefore production and price uncertainty affect expected productivity and expected income i hypothesize that these firstorder effects are why farmers are and should be concerned with risk the analysis of dynamic uncertain models shows that farmers optimal decisions are affected by risk whether they are risk neutral or risk averse this suggests that dynamic risk neutral models may be more useful than conventional static risk averse models for understanding the role production risk plays in farm management

review of economic growth and energy consumption a panel cointegration analysis for eu countries abstract this paper examines the long run relationship between energy consumption and real gdp including fixed capital and total employment for 18 eu countries from 1995 to 2012 the analysis was based on the panel unit root tests panel cointegration test and fully modified ordinary least squares fmols estimator and dynamic ordinary least squares dols estimator data were analyzed in three groups all sample visegrad countries v4 and old 14 eu countries indeed the results demonstrate that economic growth and the variables energy consumption gross fixed capital are cointegrated for the whole panel of countries as well as for the two selected groups of countries furthermore the panel fmols and dols estimators reveal that the relationship between energy consumption gross fixed capital and economic growth is positive

the efficiency of capital allocation in this paper we present an intertemporal general equilibrium model of the u s economy the purpose of this model is to analyze the efficiency of capital allocation we have implemented our model econometrically for annual data covering the period 1955 80 the model encompasses the critical features of u s tax laws applicable to income from capital equilibrium is determined by market clearing conditions for consumption and investment goods and for capital and labor services in each time period under perfect foresight there exists a unique balanced growth equilibrium corresponding to any stationary tax policy an intertemporal general equilibrium model of the u s economy is presented in this paper the purpose of this model is to analyze the efficiency of capital allocation the model is kindred in spirit to the model of the swedish economy developed by ragnar bentzel 1978

a nonparametric method to estimate a technical change effect on marginal abatement costs of u s coal power plants the literature usually assumes that technical change reduces marginal abatement cost however recent results suggest that precisely the opposite occurs this paper proposes a nonparametric method to determine the effect of technical change on marginal abatement cost the method decomposes nox marginal abatement cost changes in 2000 2004 and in 2004 2008 for 325 boilers operating in 134 u s bituminous coal power plant into technical and non technical change effects we find that technical change reduces the nox marginal cost about 28 3 in 2000 2004 and 26 5 in 2004 2008 however more stringent regulations enacted the nox budget program results in lower nox emission levels as plant operators install more advanced nox abatement equipment which in turn causes an overall increase in marginal abatement cost

instrument choice for environmental protection when technological innovation is endogenous this paper compares qualitatively and quantitatively the welfare effects of emissions taxes auctioned emissions permits and free grandfathered permits when technological innovation is endogenous we find that there is no unambiguous case for preferring any of these policy instruments the relative welfare ranking of instruments depends on the costs of innovation the extent to which innovations can be imitated the slope and level of the marginal environmental benefit function and the number of polluting firms we illustrate the types of situations when there can be significant welfare discrepancies between the policies and when there are not

neoclassical versus frontier production models testing for the skewness of regression residuals the empirical literature on production and cost functions is divided into two strands 1 the neoclassical approach that concentrates on model parameters 2 the frontier approach that decomposes the disturbance term to a symmetric noise term and a positively skewed inefficiency term we propose a theoretical justification for the skewness of the inefficiency term arguing that this skewness is the key testable hypothesis of the frontier approach we propose to test the regression residuals for skewness to distinguish the two competing approaches our test builds directly upon the asymmetry of regression residuals and does not require any prior distributional assumptions

the impact of disaggregated energy on productivity abstract the issue of the productivity slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s has received considerable analysis in the literature however the issue of the impact of energy on productivity is still debated this study contributes to the debate with the hope that some sight could be provided through disaggregating the factor input energy into two components a petroleum component and a non petroleum component by analysing labour productivity growth total factor productivity growth and labour intensity ratios the disaggregated energy component can be viewed as a major influence in explaining the productivity decline

price differences among crude oils the private costs of supply disruptions i quantify the causes for price differences among crude oils that are set by the law of one price with a special emphasis on country risk for crude oils that are part of the same market i estimate cointegrating relations which represent their long run relation and error correction models which represent the rate at which the market eliminates disequilibrium in their prices results indicate that positive values of country risk impose a 0 51 price penalty on a barrel of crude oil from an unreliable supplier that increases with the variance in risk and the price of crude oil these price penalties are the first empirical estimates for how the market values the private costs of oil supply disruptions beyond country risk the price effects of sulfur content density distance between supply ports and opec membership confirm the importance of oil supply choke points opec s ability to influence prices and differences in refinery technology because private costs of a supply disruption attach only to nations with a non zero country risk previous estimates for the social costs of a supply disruption may be too large

international technological knowledge differences and economic growth comparisons usa versus west germany and sweden versus norway 1963 1988 the main interest in this paper is governed by the methodology for making evolutive growth comparisons in the international context the paper analysis differences in levels and changes of these levels of aggregate output between the above mentioned countries in terms of differences in factors input and levels of technological knowledge for the period 1963 1988 sources of economic growth in each country are also examined on an annual and average annual basis th conclusion is that technological knowledge differences between countries hold a central role in explaining output differences between them a slight overtake of the technological lead is observed in comparing sweden and norway between 1977 and 1985 when a recovery by sweden begining in 1986 is detected a certain part of the output differences between the us and west germany is explaining by the differences in technology between these two countries however capital intensity in the us is found to be almost double in 1988 and this accounts fo

non parametric efficiency progress and regress measures for panel data methodological aspects this purely methodological paper deals with the role of time in non parametric efficiency analysis using both fdh and dea technologies it first shows how each observation in a panel can be characterized in efficiency terms vis a vis three different kinds of frontiers i contemporaneous ii sequential and iii intertemporal these are then compared with window analysis next frontier shifts outward and inward interpreted as progress or regress are considered for the two kinds of technologies and computational methods are described in detail for evaluating such shifts in either case these are also contrasted with what is measured by the malmquist productivity index finally an alternative way of identifying progress and regress independent of the frontier notion and referring instead to some benchmark notion is extended here to panel data

causes of the current stagflation since 1975 labour slack has been unusually high in the oecd countries and yet inflation has not diminished the less favourable mix of unemployment and rate of change of inflation which we call stagflation is explained by a fall in the feasible rate of growth of real wages unmatched by a reduction in the constant term in phillips curve to investigate this mechanism conventional wage and price equations are estimated for 19 countries and then used for simulation stagflation has been caused in roughly equal amounts by rising relative import prices and by the fall in the rate of productivity growth in the basic model the phillips curve is assumed not to adapt to falls in feasible real wage growth but in a final section an adaptive wage equation is estimated which confirms that the process of adaptation is slow

investigating and comparing the dynamic patterns of the business value of information technology over time abstract the long debated issue of the business value of information technology it to the firm country has received a great deal of attention in the literature but the studies have rarely examined the dynamic patterns of the it value as measured by the firm s productive efficiency over time the objective of this paper is to apply the three factor constant elasticity of substitution ces time varying stochastic production frontier models and use the same data set as used in several previous studies to investigate the dynamic patterns of it value over time in connection with the issues of inputs substitution and complement and the productivity paradox this paper adopts two analytical skills collective and individual to analyze the empirical results collectively we find that the dynamic patterns of it value are closely related to the substitution and complement of three inputs and the it productivity paradox individually we identify five common dynamic patterns of the it value measured by productive efficiency and interpret their implications for the productivity paradox as summarized in a two by two matrix of practical applications and strategies this matrix accounts for four different scenarios of the relationship between the average productive efficiency and the it productivity paradox illustrates some practical applications by the analytical results and provides some business insights and managerial strategies for it decision makers and po is managers this represents a new contribution to the understanding of the dynamic influence of it investments upon the value of it over time

frontier estimation and firm specific inefficiency measures in the presence of heteroscedasticity the purpose of this article is to illustrate a straightforward and useful method for addressing the problem of heteroscedasticity in the estimation of frontiers a heteroscedastic cost frontier model is developed and estimated using bank cost data similar to that used by ferrier and lovell our results show dramatic changes in the estimated cost frontier and in the inefficiency measures when accounting for heteroscedasticity in the estimation process we find that the rankings of firms by their inefficiency measures is affected markedly by the correction for heteroscedasticity but not by alternative distributional assumptions about the one sided error term

biases in frontier estimation due to heteroscedasticity abstract this paper investigates the effects of heteroscedasticity on the parameters in frontier regression models a monte carlo experiment is employed to determine that heteroscedasticity leads to overestimation of the intercept and underestimation of the slope coefficients