efficiency growth and concentration an empirical analysis of hospital markets taking an evolutionary view of markets harold demsetz hypothesized that firms differ persistently in efficiency and that industry concentration results from growth of efficient firms at the expense of inefficient ones we test the hypothesis with high quality microdata from the us hospital industry an industry of keen policy and scientific interest we measure efficiency by firm in the early 1980s and relate it to subsequent growth of efficient firms to the persistence of profit differences and to changes in the concentration of markets initial hospital efficiency and subsequent growth and profitability are significantly and positively related also greater initial variation in hospital efficiency within local markets is positively related to subsequent growth in market concentration these findings support the logic of demsetz s evolutionary efficiency hypothesis though they cannot confirm the stronger idea that variation in firm efficiency is the dominant explanation for changes in concentration

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

private agri food standards implications for food policy and the agri food system abstract this paper provides a brief introduction to the evolution and nature of private food safety and quality standards highlighting the resultant impacts on the structure and modus operandi of supply chains for agricultural and food products and the challenges posed for processes of agricultural development it serves as an introduction to a series of papers that provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge regarding private food safety and quality standards in both an industrialised and developing country context in so doing it aims to provide a catalyst for further research on this rapidly evolving field of inquiry

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

school district consolidation market concentration and the scale efficiency tradeoff consolidation is often proposed as a strategy for increasing school district quality without increasing educational funding however if consolidation reduces competition in the local school market and reduces efficiency any savings from exploiting economies of scale may be lost to increased inefficiency we use a stochastic cost function to investigate these effects for districts in texas we find important economies of scale but we also find that increased market concentration leads to increased cost inefficiency finally we illustrate the practical importance of these two potentially offsetting factors in a simulation that considers consolidating texas school districts to county level districts we find that failure to consider the effect on competition can lead to large overestimates of the benefits of consolidation

estimation of input oriented technical efficiency using a nonhomogeneous stochastic production frontier model technical inefficiency can be modeled as either input oriented io or output oriented oo however in the estimation of parametric stochastic production frontier models which use maximum likelihood method only the oo measure is used in this article we consider a simple nonhomogeneous production function and estimate it with both io and oo specifications a sample of 80 spanish dairy data 1993 1998 is used to estimate both models we consider one output liters of milk and four variable inputs viz number of cows kilograms of concentrates hectares of land and labor measured in man equivalent units we find that returns to scale rts and technical efficiency results derived from these models are different because either estimated technologies are different or they are evaluated at different points using a monte carlo analysis we show that if rts is close to unity differences in the estimates of rts and technical efficiency are smaller this holds true for estimates of both rts and technical efficiency

technology invention and diffusion in residential energy consumption a stochastic frontier approach traditional large appliances absorb a large share of residential electricity consumption and represent important targets of energy policy strategies aimed at achieving energy security despite being characterized by rather mature technologies this group of appliances still offers large potential in terms of efficiency gains due to their pervasive diffusion in this paper we analyse the electricity consumption of a set of four traditional white goods in a panel of ten eu countries observed over 21 years 1990 2010 with the aim of disentangling the amount of technical efficiency from the overall energy saving the technical efficiency trend is modelled through a set of technology components representing both the invention and adoption process by the means of specific patents weighted by production and bilateral import flows which allows to overcome the rigid stochastic frontier framework in modelling the effect of technical change our results show that the derived energy demand and inefficiency trends are both related to changes in the amount of available technology embodied in energy efficient appliances the effect is significant both in its domestic and international components and suggests an active role of innovation and trade policies for achieving efficiency targets which directly impact the amount of electricity consumed by households

strategic use of private standards to enhance international competitiveness vegetable exports from kenya and elsewhere abstract the paper examines how european retailers are using private standards for food safety and quality as risk management and competitive tools and the strategic responses of leading kenyan and other developing country supplier exporters to such standards despite measures to harmonize a single market the european fresh produce market is very diverse in terms of consumer preferences structural dynamics and attention to and enforcement of food safety and other standards leading kenyan fresh produce suppliers have re positioned themselves at the high end including high care segments of the market precisely those that are most demanding in terms of quality assurance and food safety systems an array of factors have influenced this strategic positioning including relatively high international freight costs the emergence of more effective competition in mainstream product lines relatively low labor costs for produce preparation and strong market relationships with selected retail chains to succeed in this demanding market segment the industry has had to invest substantially in improved production and procurement systems upgraded pack house facilities and quality assurance food safety management systems

the diffusion of production processes in the u s banking industry a finite mixture approach abstract this article applies finite mixture distributions to the estimation of cost functions for financial firms through time the mixture approach allows the estimation of multiple technologies when firms technology choices are unobservable technology switching diffusion and underlying technical change are simultaneously evaluated an application to large samples of u s banks for the years 1982 1986 illustrates the approach results suggest banks switch to lower cost production technologies when unburdened by strict branching regulations

a two tiered earnings frontier estimation of employer and employee information in the labor market this pap er develops a two tiered frontier estimation procedure to decompose the residual of an earnings function into three components the first component can be interpreted as being purely random search theory is used to show that the other two components represent employee and employer ignorance of offer and reservation wages respectively relative employee and employer ignorance estimates are presented for various population strata copyright 1987 by mit press

sensitivity analysis of efficiency rankings to distributional assumptions applications to japanese water utilities this article examines the robustness of efficiency score rankings across four distributional assumptions for trans log stochastic production frontier models using data from 1221 japanese water utilities for 2004 and 2005 one sided error terms considered include the half normal truncated normal exponential and gamma distributions results are compared for homoscedastic and doubly heteroscedastic models where we also introduce a doubly heteroscedastic variable mean model and examine the sensitivity of the nested models to a stronger heteroscedasticity correction for the one sided error component the results support three conclusions regarding the sensitivity of efficiency rankings to distributional assumptions when four standard distributional assumptions are applied to a homoscedastic stochastic frontier model the efficiency rankings are quite consistent when those assumptions are applied to a doubly heteroscedastic stochastic frontier model the efficiency rankings are consistent when proper a

market structure and the efficiency of european insurance companies a stochastic frontier analysis abstract this paper is motivated by the progressive liberalisation of the european insurance market in recent years it uses stochastic frontier analysis to estimate flexible fourier cost functions for european insurance companies separate frontiers are estimated for life non life and composite companies we adopt a maximum likelihood approach to estimation in which the variance of both one sided and two sided error terms is modelled jointly with the frontiers this approach allows us to simultaneously control for the impact of heteroskedasticity on the estimation of scale economies as well as estimating the effect of firm size and market structure on x inefficiency the study draws on standard poor s eurothesys data set of financial reports for the period 1995 to 2001 this provides technical and non technical accounts at year end for life non life and composite insurance businesses in 14 major european countries our estimates suggest that over this period most european insurers were operating under conditions of decreasing costs increasing returns to scale and that company size and domestic market share were significant factors determining x inefficiency larger firms and those with high market shares tend to have higher levels of cost inefficiency

evaluating the impact of individual fishing quotas ifqs on the technical efficiency and composition of the us gulf of mexico red snapper commercial fishing fleet this study examines the impact of individual fishing quotas ifqs on the technical efficiency te and composition of the gulf of mexico red snapper commercial fishing fleet employing a parametric stochastic distance frontier framework we find that ifqs improved the te of the vertical line and bottom longline fleets our results suggest that the observed te gains were mainly driven by the retirement of less efficient vessels and to a lesser extent by efficiency gains of the remaining vessels we also document changes in output and input distance elasticities and in returns to scale following the introduction of ifqs the paper also investigates the impact of regulations and weather on productivity and the effect of crowding on te policy implications stemming from these results are also discussed

the demand for enhanced annuities abstract this paper examines market reaction to the introduction of enhanced annuities in a market for deferred standard annuities the previous literature shows that individuals can try to avoid risk classification by contracting a standard annuity earlier in their life this paper offers a new perspective to the timing of the annuity purchase under the assumption that individuals already have an idea about their future risk type when young which becomes clearer over time it shows that enhanced annuities can crowd out earlier standard annuities completely if the individuals have incomplete knowledge of their future risk type however if individuals are sufficiently risk averse and there is a sufficiently high proportion of low risks in the population both products can remain in the market where lower risk types buy enhanced annuities while the higher risks stick to the early standard annuities the paper identifies the equilibrium candidate with both annuity types to be pareto superior and the unique equilibrium

efficiency and performance in gas distribution evidence from brazil this article analyses the current state of the gas distribution industry in brazil by identifying the main factors that determine its efficiency in order to test the performance of the industry we have calculated the firms technical efficiency during the period 2001 2009 we analyse whether some economic and technological factors as consumer density load factor or regulation among others have affected the performance of this industry we show that companies serving markets with different customer characteristics diversification have reached higher levels of efficiency and evolved faster moreover the private ownership and price cap regulation are more efficient in relation to public ownership and cost of service regulation these findings are important to support the improvement of the regulation of gas distribution in the brazilian states

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

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

innovative performance effects of institutional quality an empirical investigation from the triad using data for a set of 823 r d intense manufacturing firms within the triad and the quality of government qog dataset over the 2002 2010 period this article investigates the effects of institut

technical efficiency in the italian performing arts companies this paper evaluates the determinants of firms technical efficiency in the italian performing arts pa sector by estimating a stochastic production frontier for an unbalanced panel of 107 firms over the period 2005 2012 the panel data setting allows us to control for both unobserved and observed heterogeneity of pa firms reaching several interesting and robust findings firstly it finds that the italian pa firms are scale inefficient as they generally operate in either an increasing or decreasing returns to scale landscape this result is reinforced by the fact that the smaller firms 10 49 employees are the most technically efficient firm size class secondly this research proves that the efficiency score is on average 66 demonstrating that pa firms output could be substantially increased without the use of new inputs thirdly it confirms that the quality matters and competences increase the efficiency in the sector finally the environmental factors especially the quality of institutions have a strong impact on technical efficiency of pa firms supporting that regional differences also exist in this sector

methodologies and perspectives in research on labour relations in global agricultural production networks a review the integration of global south actors into the global agricultural economy has attracted research on labour effects this is because global south actors are often integrated at the level of produc

can public private partnerships leverage private investment in agricultural value chains in africa a preliminary review summary public private partnerships ppps may be one way of increasing the level of private sector investment into poorly performing agricultural value chains this paper considers a range of ppp mechanisms that respond to different market failures affecting such chains and draws on principal agent theory to illustrate the challenges it reviews emerging experience with a number of these mechanisms along with experience from other sectors that may shed light on generic problems of implementing ppps in africa while finding some positive impacts on investment it notes that state failures can also undermine ppp effectiveness as the evidence base is still limited it calls on organizations promoting innovative ppps to disclose available information for critical examination

uncertainty resolution and the timing of annuity purchases abstract this paper considers the question of why the annuity market is thin a model is presented in which consumers have the option of purchasing annuities before discovering their survival probability they can then recontract the initial choice after the resolution of this form of uncertainty it is shown that consumers purchase insurance against their own survival probability type at a very young age and do not undertake further transactions this characterization is then used to analze the effects of introducing future income uncertainty and to investigate the trade off between old age insurance motive and portfilio flexibility

optimum and risk class pricing of annuities when information on longevity survival functions is unknown early in life individuals have an interest in insuring themselves against moving into different risk classes as their life expectancy is revealed the first best allocation involves transfers across states of nature with symmetric information competitive equilibrium separates different risk classes and cannot provide such transfers because insurance firms are unable to precommit when utility is invariant to risk class realisation the optimum entails uniform consumption and optimum retirement age independent of risk class and an optimum social security scheme is superior to competitive equilibrium when preferences depend on risk class welfare ranking of systems becomes indeterminate much work has been undertaken by economists to understand and rationalise the annuity puzzle the fact that the markets for private voluntarily purchased annuities

costs of nitrogen runoff for rural water utilities a shadow cost approach this paper explores the interactions among scale and density economies productive efficiency water quality and customer characteristics and their impact on the costs of delivering treated drinking water implicit benefits of nitrogen abatement are also derived and hypothesis tests concerning their hypothesized drivers are conducted key findings are that nitrogen removal costs increase with rising raw water nitrogen concentration coming from agricultural activities and that network density and system size matter in determining average total costs of community water systems merging water systems to take advantage of scale economies may be difficult due to the heterogeneity of the sector however

coffee value chains on the move evidence in ethiopia abstract important changes have happened to the upstream segment of the coffee sector in ethiopia africa s biggest in the last decade as illustrated by the increasing adoption of improved production harvest and post harvest practices upstream marketing has also improved and there have been large investments in processing capacity shown by the extended coverage of wet mills these improved practices are shown to be associated with positive impacts on coffee productivity and prices changes appear to be linked with multiple factors including local market reform greater presence of public extension agents high international prices and a push for certification by international buyers on the other hand a combination of production lack of improved seedlings weather and disease shocks as well as institutional issues saving constraints and lack of vertical integration and traceability have seemingly impeded more widespread uptake of improved practices and therefore better farm performance the study illustrates the significant complexity in obtaining transformation at the farm level in these settings

do farmers choose to be inefficient evidence from bicol abstract farming households that differ in their ability or willingness to take on risks are likely to allocate resources and effort among income producing activities differently with consequences for productivity in this paper we measure voluntary and involuntary departures from efficiency for rice producing households in the bicol region of the philippines we take advantage of a panel of observations on households from 1978 1983 and 1994 available monthly weather data and survey information on planting times allows us to create household specific measures of weather shocks which we use in our analysis we find evidence that diversification and input choices do affect efficiency outcomes among farmers although these effects are not dominant accumulated wealth past decisions to invest favorable market conditions and propitious weather are also important determinants of efficiency outcomes among bicol rice farmers our findings suggest that the costs of incomplete formal and informal insurance markets are higher for poorer farmers

a multiproduct cost study of savings and loans this paper investigates the cost structure of savings and loans most studies of financial institutions have failed to take into account the multiproduct nature of these institutions using the multiproduct approach the existence of subadditivity multiproduct global and product specific economies of scale and scope and substitutability between inputs is investigated a translogarithmic cost function is estimated using 1982 data on california savings and loans restrictive functional forms also estimated are rejected standard errors for the statistics calculated are estimated and various statistical tests are conducted previous authors have not calculated standard errors for these statistics no evidence of subadditivity in the industry is found in order to investigate the impact of deregulation on the financial services industry it is necessary to know the cost structure of the industry optimal firm size and product mix can be determined once the structure is known the presence of scale economies would imply that smaller firms or entering firms that operate at a small scale would be at a cost disadvantage compared with larger established firms a finding of economies of scope i e economies of joint production would imply that firms that were specialized would be at a cost disadvantage and that regulations that restrict the outputs a firm is allowed to produce may lead to inefficient production

fuel poverty and well being a consumer theory and stochastic frontier approach abstract evidence and conventional wisdom suggest that general poverty has a negative effect on the well being of individuals however the mechanisms through which this effect occurs are not well understood through economic approach in this paper we analyse the influence of general and fuel poverty as well as the social dimension through peer comparison on the subjective well being of households we develop a novel approach to analyse fuel poverty and well being based on consumer theory individual preferences are modelled using indifference curves and a distance function where the preferences of individuals are affected by their poverty status we use the survey data from the official spanish life condition survey for 2013 which contains over 16 608 observations on household members the results show that both general and fuel poverty influence the reference indifference curve but that individuals also compare themselves with their peers the proposed model also allows us to corroborate how general and fuel poverty affect well being and how effective policies can be designed to improve social welfare

predicting technical effciency in stochastic production frontier models in the presence of misspecification a monte carlo analysis this paper provides a theoretical explanation for the sensitivity of technical efficiency measures to the choice of functional specification in stochastic production frontier models it is shown that inappropriate functional specifications translate into a misspecification in the conditional mean of the stochastic frontier regression model this misspecification in turn results in estimates of technical efficiency confidence intervals and production elasticities being biased even asymptotically monte carlo simulations reveal that the severity of the bias depends on the functional specification and the percentage contribution of the variance of technical inefficiency to the total variance of the composed errors

the potential estimation and factor analysis of china s energy conservation on thermal power industry new huadu business school research fund national social science foundation of china 12zd059 ministry of education 10gbj013

the measurement of efficiency in life insurance estimates of a mixed normal gamma error model abstract this paper make three contributions to the literature on efficiency in financial services first it presents estimates of a mixed error cost frontier in which the variances of both the normal and gamma distributions can vary with firm size second it extends the literature on life insurance scale and product mix economies by incorporating and measuring x inefficiency estimates of x inefficiency range from 35 to 50 ray scale economies exist up to 15 billion in assets third comparisons of normal gamma estimates with other methods 3 thick frontier weighted least squares half normal distributions 3 demonstrate some of their pitfalls

determinants of bank cost efficiency in transition economies evidence for latin america central and eastern europe and south east asia in this study we adopt wang s 2002 heteroscedastic stochastic frontier model which allows us to investigate bank cost efficiency and to measure the marginal effects of some variables on both the level and the variability of inefficiency in recent years the financial crisis has significantly affected the banking systems of the transition countries hence the efficiency is of major importance for the stability of the banks regarding the determinants of efficiency we find evidence that banks that follow a more cautious strategy characterized by lower risk appetite and average expectations on profitability have higher cost efficiency we also find that traditional deposit taking and loan making still remain the most efficient activity of the banks additionally the results showed that a higher gross domestic product growth rate implies an increase in the inefficiency level indicating an unsustainable bank management behaviour which in periods of economic growth adopts policies that can generate

analysing wage differentials when workers maximize the return to human capital investment abstractthe analysis of the determinants of differences in wages across workers has traditionally relied on the estimation of average earnings functions in this article we propose a new theoretical model where it is the workers who decide the amount they wish to invest in human capital taking into account the costs of acquiring those skills for the purpose of maximizing earnings in this model both human capital and marginal productivity are likely to be influenced by the individual s unobserved characteristics such as ability or motivation potentially giving rise to endogeneity problems in this context the empirical implementation of our theoretical model allows us under certain assumptions to obtain consistent estimates even under the assumption of endogeneity we present an empirical application to the education sector using data from the spanish structure of earnings survey 2010 our results show that females and workers in the private education sector face more difficulties in achieving t

a comprehensive analysis of the effects of risk measures on bank efficiency evidence from emerging asian countries this study investigates the role of risk in determining the cost efficiency of international banks in eight emerging asian countries researchers of this paper consider three distinct risk aspects under a total of eight risk measures credit risk operational risk and market risk we apply a heteroscedastic stochastic frontier model to estimate bank cost efficiency in our analysis additionally this study analyzes the marginal effects of all risk measures on the inefficiency effect in order to explore a more detailed relationship between risks and efficiency the empirical results indicate that the risk measures represent significant effects on both the level and variability of bank efficiency we also find that these effects vary across countries and over time

determinants of retailers decisions to use public or private grades and standards evidence from the fresh produce market of sao paulo brazil abstract this paper models retailers choices between public and private grades and standards g s and their means of administering them it focuses on the firm specific factors influencing the decision increasing use of private g s worldwide particularly by large powerful retail chains has implications for competition participation and the effectiveness and efficiency of public policy regarding g s drawing from a study of fresh produce markets in sao paulo brazil the paper shows that the importance of the product in the firm s activities or sales market power scale of operations and investment in brand capital and reputation are key firm specific factors encouraging the use of private g s regimes over public important contextual determinants are the strategic objective of the standard the institutional environment and the characteristics of the product and market a range of formal and informal private and public methods for administering g s was found the paper discusses policy implications of the results focusing on issues of substitutability and complementarity between public and private g s regimes

government policy and agricultural productivity in indonesia we focus on the agricultural productivity implications of the complex of investment price and research policies the indonesian government has employed since the end of the green revolution in particular we employ a new 1985 2005 provincial panel dataset together with a stochastic output distance frontier framework to examine how government policies have affected the nation s agricultural productivity decomposing it into its technical progress and efficiency components government s primary contributions to technology growth have come through price and trade policies rather than public research most technology growth however appears to be due to informal technology diffusion copyright 2010 oxford university press

old age longevity and mortality contingent claims this paper analyzes the savings and longevity impacts of mortality contingent claims defined here as income measures such as annuities and life insurance under which earned income is contingent on the length of one s life the postwar increase in mandatory annuity and life insurance programs as well as the rapid increase in the life expectancy of older ages motivates a better understanding of the incentive effects that mortality contingent claims have on longevity related behavior we claim that these incentives in often alter the standard conclusions obtained about old age support when mortality is treated exogenously in particular we argue that annuities involve moral hazard effects that increase longevity and among other things introduce a positive interaction between public programs for health care and income support for the elderly programs that have grown enormously in developed countries

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

fdi performance a stochastic frontier analysis of location and variance determinants the opening up process of the eastern european countries was marked by greater integration of fdi with their western neighbouring countries using the single step ml approach to stochastic frontier analysis the location and variance determinants of fdi are estimated using the knowledge capital kk model framework the findings based on a panel of bilateral fdi stocks from 10 western to 10 eastern european countries over the 1996 2007 period suggest fdi is determined by both horizontal and vertical motives while the process of liberalization and infrastructural developments significantly reduces the variance of fdi in using a stochastic frontier specification of the kk model the efficiency of fdi performance is identified relative to maximum levels the bilateral efficiency scores suggest a mixed performance indicating scope to improve the efficiency of fdi

private enforcement capital and contract enforcement in transition economies the enforcement of contracts is necessary for efficient exchange and investment in economic activities there are many situations where public institutions are ineffective in enforcing contracts this is the case in economies in transition where public enforcement institutions themselves are being reformed under such conditions private mechanisms could enforce contracts external private enforcement is done by third parties e g strong arm private agents although such enforcement may be effective it may have unwanted externalities alternatively internal private enforcement can be done through the use of so called private enforcement capital i e private losses that result from breaching the contract these losses result directly from contract termination or non renewal and indirectly from reputational damage by designing contracts such that these private losses from contract breach outweigh potential benefits contracts can be made self enforcing in this article we first present a conceptual framework to interpret contracts and to analyze how the use of private enforcement capital can enforce contracts then we illustrate such internal private contract enforcement mechanisms with several case study examples of agri business contracting in transition countries where public enforcement fails

the estimation of frictional unemployment a stochastic frontier approach this paper reports an estimate of the frictional unemployment rate in u s manufacturing that is derived from a parametric statistical method for estimating stochastic frontiers the steady state perfect foresight solution to an estimated employment growth frontier provides a locus of technically efficient frictional rates of unemployment the mean frictional unemployment rate during the sample period is estimated to be 3 7 percent of the manufacturing labor force this estimate conforms closely to an estimate of 3 5 percent that is derived from manufacturing sector data presented by david m lilien 1980 for roughly the same time period copyright 1991 by mit press

a note on savings and loan ownership structure and expense preference a re examination this study extends the work of akella and greenbaum journal of banking finance 12 1988 419 through the use of a much larger nationwide sample of us saving and loan associations and supports their original finding of significant expense preference behavior in mutual savings and loans during their original study period 1979 80 this study also provides evidence that over the time period of substantial deregulation and changes in the competitive environment in the us financial services industry expense preference behavior for savings and loans decreased the results are consistent with the idea that the removal of barriers that restrict competition should improve managerial efficiency in firms that survive 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the impact of farmers health and nutritional status on their productivity and efficiency evidence from ethiopia this article focuses on the link between agricultural productivity and health and nutrition status of peasants in ethiopia the data come from the first round of the ethiopian rural household survey conducted in 1994 the sites selected were those in which farmers practice ox plow cultivation of cereals a stochastic frontier approach was adopted for the agricultural production the findings of the study show that the distance to the source of water as well as nutrition and morbidity status affect agricultural productivity the market wage rate is also very responsive to the weight for height as well as the body mass index and height in a context where separability between consumption and production decisions of the household is rejected elasticities of labor productivity with respect to nutritional status are noted to be strong and similar in technology estimates and wage equations moreover returns to investment in nutrition are clearly high in the ethiopian context overall the results indicate substantial loss in output due to technical inefficiency even after accounting for the health and nutrition of workers

estimation of a doubly heteroscedastic stochastic frontier cost function this article extends the results obtained by caudill ford and cropper in estimating and testing stochastic frontier cost functions in the presence of heteroscedastic inefficiency using cross section data it suggests the estimation of the model under the assumption of heteroscedasticity in both random terms this avoids any possible misspecification bias and the use of incorrect tests the same data as used by caudill et al supports the new specification moreover we find that firm specific inefficiency measures are extremely sensitive to the proposed correction for heteroscedasticity

will they buy it the potential for marketing organic vegetables in the food vending sector to strengthen vegetable safety a choice experiment study in three west african cities abstract considering the hazardous use of synthetic pesticides in vegetable production in urban west africa this research investigated the marketing potential of organic vegetables in the food vending sector of cotonou benin accra ghana and ouagadougou burkina faso certified organic production and marketing was examined as a potential strategy to improve chemical food safety a stratified random sampling strategy was applied to study the preferences of food vendors n 180 and consumers n 360 vegetable use risk perception choice preferences and willingness to pay wtp for organic certification were specifically analyzed the results showed that awareness of chemical contamination risks was generally low appearance of a product was central to vendor choice consumers attributed similar utility to taste and organic certification consumer wtp was calculated to be a premium of 1 04 usd per plate if the food served contained only certified organic vegetables in restaurants this would mean an average premium of 19 for a meal if certified organic vegetable production is to make a positive impact on food safety in urban west africa we suggest concentrating marketing efforts on the educated elite who frequent restaurants however considering that restaurant owners exhibited a lower preference for organic certification than lower class food vendors the marketing situation is difficult we therefore conclude that demand from the food vending sector alone will not institutionalize domestic certification mechanisms this underlines the need for public commitment to facilitating such change

evaluating research and education performance in indian agricultural development india s agricultural research spending has long been regionally uneven regional research intensity ratios which account for size differences indicate research spending has consistently favored southern and western states over northern central and eastern ones farm production patterns have however changed in recent years and regional output growth is being driven by new commodity mixes in this paper we ask which region had the highest factor productivity growth and rate of return to investments in public agricultural research and higher education our analysis relies on a 1980 2008 indian agricultural production and policy dataset together with a dual heteroscedastic production frontier to decompose total factor productivity tfp growth into formal technical progress and efficiency elements the model s regional flexibility affords region to region comparison of multiple research return rates tfp growth and the elements influencing them regardless of return rate measure or allocation scenario evaluated the north has enjoyed the highest return to research spending and the central and east the lowest factor productivity growth has however been strongest in the south primarily on account of efficiency gains overall though the technical progress and productivity growth easily attributable to government supported research has been rather low this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

are women better bankers to the poor evidence from rural microfinance institutions microfinance institutions mfis provide financial services to the poor and in many ways resemble both banks and non profit organizations many mfis target women because more women than men are poor especially in rural areas studies show that women manage money differently from men and have different leadership styles thus in credit unions and financial firms female and male managers achieve different results in microfinance gender diversity on the board of mfis is beneficial and loans authorized by female loan officers have lower default rates motivated by these findings we ask whether mfis with a female chief executive officer ceo are more efficient at serving the poor without jeopardizing financial sustainability we adapt the banking approach to managerial in efficiency to account for the outreach and sustainability goals of the mfis and evaluate whether mfis outreach efficiency differs by the gender of their respective ceos we estimate a stochastic frontier cost function using the battese coelli 1995 model and the true random effects estimators using panel data from over 250 mfis we find that mfis with female ceos have significantly higher outreach efficiency than mfis with male ceos similar results are found with a two step stochastic frontier approach overall the results suggest that promoting gender diversity at the top levels of mfi management is likely to have both social and financial benefits

which microfinance institutions are becoming more cost effective with time evidence from a mixture model italian speakers tend to stress the second component of german morphologically complex words such as compounds and prefix verbs even if the first component is lexically stressed to improve their prosodic phrasing an automatic pronunciation teaching method was developed based on auditory feedback of prosodically corrected utterances in the learners own voices basically the method copies contours of f0 local speech rate and intensity from reference utterances of a german native speaker to the learners speech signals it also adds emphasis to the stress position in order to help the learners better recognise the correct pronunciation and identify their errors a perception test with german native speakers revealed that manipulated utterances significantly better reflect lexical stress than the corresponding original utterances thus two groups of italian learners of german were provided with different feedback during a training session one group with manipulated utterances in their individual voices and the other with correctly pronounced original utterances in the teacher s voice afterwards both groups produced the same sentences again and german native speakers judged the resulting utterances resynthesised stimuli especially with emphasised stress were found to be a more effective feedback than natural stimuli to learn the correct stress position since resynthesis was obtained without previous segmentation of the learners speech signals this technology could be effectively included in computer assisted language learning software

food safety regulation an overview of contemporary issues abstract this article discusses a number of issues that are influencing the evolution of food safety regulation in developed and to a lesser extent developing countries whilst not definitive it aims to highlight those factors which are considered crucial to an understanding of contemporary food safety controls in both the public and private spheres these issues include criteria applied to assess the need justification for food safety regulation relationships between public and private food safety control systems alternative forms that public food safety regulation can take strategic responses to food safety regulation and the trade implications of national food safety controls the article serves as an introduction to these issues which are discussed at greater length in the other papers that make up this special issue of food policy

standards as a new form of social contract sustainability initiatives in the coffee industry abstract in the former age of national capitalism the achievement of market fairness was embedded in a normative framework generated by government labor unions and perhaps religious authority in the current age of global capitalism new actors such as ngos industry associations and public private partnerships provide the normative framework that corporations use for social legitimacy in this context standard setting processes operate as new forms of social contract where the state rather than being directly involved between the parties provides a form of basic guarantee while more or less accountable ngos and firms are in charge of hammering out the bargains this article examines the dynamics of this new configuration through the case study of sustainability initiatives in the coffee sector it addresses four questions 1 are these standards effective in communicating information and creating new markets 2 to what extent do they embed elements of collective and private interests 3 is sustainability content actually delivered to their intended beneficiaries and 4 what is the role of public policy in addressing their shortcomings