cost allocation and convex data envelopment abstract this paper considers allocation rules first we demonstrate that costs allocated by the aumann shapley and the friedman moulin cost allocation rules are easy to determine in practice using convex envelopment of registered cost data and parametric programming second from the linear programming problems involved it becomes clear that the allocation rules technically speaking allocate the non zero value of the dual variable for a convexity constraint on to the output vector hence the allocation rules can also be used to allocate inefficiencies in non parametric efficiency measurement models such as data envelopment analysis dea the convexity constraint of the bcc model introduces a non zero slack in the objective function of the multiplier problem and we show that the cost allocation rules discussed in this paper can be used as candidates to allocate this slack value on to the input or output variables and hence enable a full allocation of the inefficiency on to the input or output variables as in the ccr model

aid policy and growth in post conflict societies countries emerging from civil war attract both aid and policy advice this paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post conflict growth process it is based on a comprehensive data set of large civil wars and covers 27 countries that were in their first decade of post conflict economic recovery during the 1990s the authors first investigate whether the absorptive capacity for aid is systematically different in post conflict countries they find that during the first three post conflict years absorptive capacity is no greater than normal but that in the rest of the first decade it is approximately double its normal level so ideally aid should phase in during the decade historically aid has not on average been higher in post conflict societies and it has tended to taper out over the course of the decade the authors then investigate whether the contribution of policy to growth is systematically different in post conflict countries and in particular whether particular components of policy are differentially important for this they use the world bank policy rating database the authors find that growth is more sensitive to policy in post conflict societies comparing the efficacy of different policies they find that social policies are differentially important relative to macroeconomic policies however historically this does not appear to have been how policy reform has been prioritized in post conflict societies

efficiency analysis for exogenously fixed inputs and outputs we evaluate by means of mathematical programming formulations the relative technical and scale efficiencies of decision making units dmus when some of the inputs or outputs are exogenously fixed and beyond the discretionary control of dmu managers this approach further develops the work on efficiency evaluation and on estimation of efficient production frontiers known as data envelopment analysis dea we also employ the model to provide efficient input and output targets for dmu managers in a way that specifically accounts for the fixed nature of some of the inputs or outputs we illustrate the approach using real data for a network of fast food restaurants

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

commercial branch performance evaluation and results communication in a canadian bank a dea application abstract in this paper we focus on evaluating the performance of the commercial branches of a large canadian bank using data envelopment analysis two production models are considered in this country wide evaluation one model looking directly at resource usage is most useful to the branch manager the other model incorporating financial results is more geared towards senior management we introduce non discretionary factors to reflect specific aspects of the environment a branch is operating in such as risk and economic growth rate of the region both input and output multipliers are constrained by incorporating market prices as well as managerial preferences in order to get effectiveness measures the cost minimisation study led to valuable results pertaining to the performance of individual branches notable is the methodology introduced here that shows how to present graphical and numeric outcomes to managers gap maps pie charts and target tables are produced for each branch to provide performance goals for the managers useful information has also been obtained at the district level output oriented models were analysed to reflect the bank s recent emphasis towards growth in some areas

measuring economic efficiency with incomplete price information with an application to european commercial banks measuring economic efficiency requires complete price information while resorting to technical efficiency exclusively does not allow one to utilise any price information in most studies at least some information on the prices is available from theory or practical knowledge of the industry under evaluation in this paper we extend the theory of efficiency measurement to accommodate incomplete price information by deriving upper and lower bounds for farrell s overall economic efficiency the bounds typically give a better approximation for economic efficiency than technical efficiency measures that use no price data whatsoever from an operational point of view we derive new data envelopment analysis dea models for computing these bounds using standard linear programming the practical application of these estimators is illustrated with an empirical application to large european union commercial banks

some unsolved problems in data envelopment analysis a survey abstract the present study is a survey of a set of inherent characteristics and unsolved problems in current dea models we will focus on what types of local characteristics the dea estimated technology exhibits in relation to non jointness of a multi output multi input production no indicators are currently available telling the analysts whether or not the structure in data supports the existence of a joint technology if the estimated ccr technology has a sparse facet structure in the sense that few facets are active for output vectors in certain cones of the output space then the multi output multi input ccr technology is possibly locally non joint another important field of research relates to the inclusion of explicit distributional assumptions as part of the dea model specification and to the extension of the dea estimation from an estimation of a deterministic frontier towards an estimation of a stochastic frontier some recent results will be compared finally measures of scale economies from parametric models and dea models will be compared

on nonparametric supply response analysis in this paper we explore the usefulness of nonparametric methods in the investigation of production behavior and the estimation of price elasticities of output supply and input demand functions the approach can handle the situation where some data points are not consistent with production theory the method is illustrated by estimating supply demand elasticities of outputs and inputs in u s agriculture

foreign aid the real exchange rate and economic growth in the aftermath of civil wars foreign aid the real exchange rate rer and economic growth are three key variables that shape the aftermath of civil wars in many developing countries panel estimations drawn from a sample of 39 conflict and 44 non conflict countries between 1970 and 2004 indicate that although post conflict countries receive larger aid flows and exhibit moderate rer overvaluation after peace is attained overvaluation cannot be traced to aid yet foreign aid is among the significant determinants of the equilibrium rer an id is also an important determinant of economic growth particularly after peace is reached aid exhibits decreasing returns however and interacts negatively with rer overvaluation rer overvaluation reduces growth but this effect is ameliorated by financial development post conflict policies should therefore aim to use aid prudently avoid rer misalignment and support financial and capital market development to achi eve high and stable growth in the aftermath of war and beyond

post conflict transitions an overview in the two to five years immediately following end of conflicts united nations un peacekeeping operations have succeeded in maintaining peace while income and consumption growth rates have been higher than normal and recovery on key education and health indicators has been possible aid also has been super effective in promoting recovery not only by financing physical infrastructure but also by helping in the monetary reconstruction of post conflict economies however sustaining these short term gains was met with two difficult challenges first long term sustainability of peace and growth hinges primarily on the ability of post conflict societies to develop institutions for the delivery of public goods which in turn depends on the capacity of post conflict elites to overcome an entrenched culture of political fragmentation and form stable national coalitions beyond their immediate ethnic or regional power bases second after catch up growth runs its course high levels of aid can lead to overvalued real currencies at a time when growth requires a competitive exchange rate and economic diversification successful peace building will therefore require that these political and economic imperatives of post conflict transitions be accounted for in the design of un peacekeeping operations as well as the aid regime

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

frontier production functions and technical efficiency measures the concept of technical efficiency is central to measuring the firm performance the measurement of technical efficiency has proved difficult and complex and the literature provides a range of methodologies this paper reviews the various methodologies for measuring technical efficiency and offers a comparison between established methods of measurements the discussion is literary with less mathematical jargons and equations the objective of this paper is not to be exhaustive but to be up to date and to provide a significant discussion on some of the core methods of measuring technical efficiency

hyperbolic efficiency and return to the dollar abstract this paper after establishing the relations between hyperbolic graph measure of technical efficiency and the radial measures of technical efficiency shows that the dual cost and revenue interpretation of the hyperbolic efficiency measure is related to georgescu roegen s notion of return to the dollar n georgescu roegen in koopmans t ed activity analysis of production and allocation wiley new york 1951 pp 98 115 once this relation is established it leads to a derivation of an allocative efficiency index which measures the price distortions using data on observed costs and revenues without requiring information on prices

non parametric productivity analysis with undesirable outputs an application to the canadian pulp and paper industry this article extends the chavas cox approach to non parametric analysis by incorporating undesirable outputs to provide a more complete representation of the production technology inner and outer non parametric technology bounds are constructed the methods are illustrated with application to time series data for the canadian pulp and paper industry conventional measures that ignore changes in pollutant outputs underestimate true productivity growth further there is a large gap between estimates generated with reference to inner and outer bounds to the technology suggesting that researchers need to be aware of the limitations of results derived from analyses relying only on dea methods copyright 2001 oxford university press

measuring overall efficiency and effectiveness using dea this paper presents a framework where data envelopment analysis dea is used to measure overall efficiency and show how to apply this framework to assess effectiveness for more general behavioral goals the relationships between various cone ratio dea models and models to measure overall efficiency are clarified specifically it is shown that as multiplier cones tighten the cone ratio dea models converge to measures of overall efficiency furthermore it is argued that multiplier cone and cone ratio model selection must be consistent with the behavioral goals assigned or assumed for purposes of analysis consistent with this reasoning two new models are introduced to measure effectiveness when value measures are represented by separable or linked cones where the latter can be used to analyze profit maximizing effectiveness

efficiency and productivity of french ski resorts abstract this paper analyses french ski resorts productivity with the luenberger productivity indicator lpi based on the directional distance function it permits the calculation of a productivity indicator that is decomposed into technical efficiency change and technological change the conclusions are that productivity decreased for the majority of french ski resorts which is almost always explained by technological change finally the mixed results do not establish a clear relationship between the ski resorts size and productivity therefore the kruskal wallis test is used to statistically verify this relationship managerial implications are derived from this study

inner and outer approximations of technology a data envelopment analysis approach this paper discusses inner and outer approximation to a technology given by a data set of prices and quantities

the dutch disease a disease after all many third world oil producers are encountering serious problems in building up a diversified export base while west european oil and gas producers netherlands united kingdom are suffering a decline in their traded goods manufacturing sector induced by real wage pressures it is becoming increasingly clear that high but temporary oil revenues may be somewhat ora mixed blessing the quip of the economist notwithstanding the mechanism behind this unbalance is clear enough part of the oil revenues is spent on non traded goods which leads to a real appreciation i e a rise in the relative price of non traded goods in terms of traded goods this in turn draws resources out of the non oil traded sector into the non traded goods producing sector corden and neary 1982 van wijnbergen 1980 one may say that this is an efficient response to the increase in income from oil production the united kingdom mexico egypt simply should move into oil derived industries and non traded goods and forget about their manufacturing sector until oil reserves are exhausted however many developing countries are hesitant to take this advice after all the post world war ii success stories in economic development involve without exception countries that promoted their traded goods sector aggressively moreover it is a well established stylised fact that technological progress is faster in the traded non sheltered sectors of an economy than in the non traded sector balassa 1964 is an early reference considering the hypothesis that technological progress rather than taking place exogenously with the passage of time is a function of accumulated experience the concern of countries like egypt mexico or indonesia is much easier to understand since solow 1957 and denison 1962 it is known that capital accumulation explain only a small part of economic growth if most of economic growth is caused by learning by doing induced technologica

undesirable outputs in efficiency valuations abstract efficiency measurement is usually based on the assumption that inputs have to be minimized and outputs have to be maximized in a growing number of applications however undesirable outputs are incorporated into the production model which have to be minimized in this paper various approaches for treating such outputs in the framework of data envelopment analysis dea are discussed and the resulting efficient frontiers are compared new radial measures are introduced which assume that any change of the output level will involve both undesirable and desirable outputs

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

information asymmetry and equilibrium monitoring in education abstract we develop a theoretical and computational model of school choice and achievement that embeds information asymmetries in the provision of education because school effort is unobservable to households and policymakers schools have an incentive to under provide effort this moral hazard affects both public and private schools although public schools are subject to an additional distortion because of limited competition and fixed funding household monitoring of schools can mitigate moral hazard but some households may free ride on the monitoring of others using our calibrated model we simulate two policies aimed at raising achievement public monitoring of public schools and private school vouchers our results indicate that in large scale settings no single tool may suffice the reason is twofold a no tool raises achievement or welfare for all households and b since the extent of moral hazard is endogenous the application of each tool has unintended consequences that limit its own effectiveness results also indicate that setting the policy parameters for public schools at the levels preferred by the majority of households may mitigate the distortions nonetheless the current actual values of these parameters seem to match more closely the preferences of public schools than the preferences of parents

non parametric analysis of multi output production with joint inputs we focus on analysing cost minimising production behaviour in multi output settings we distinguish between two approaches for modelling the use of joint inputs the cooperative approach assumes cost minimisation at the aggregate firm level while the non cooperative approach assumes cost minimisation at the level of the individual output division our framework extends the existing non parametric framework for analysing single output production an empirical application to the english and welsh drinking water and sewerage sector shows the practical usefulness of our framework specifically we compare the empirical validity of the cooperative and non cooperative models for describing the observed production behaviour

testing data for consistency with revealed preference the author develops a method of hypothesis testing for revealed preference tests this method is particularly well suited to tests of commonality of tastes or tests of preference stability he devises a metric based on an estimate of the fraction of expenditure wasted in maximizing utility if all consumers in the sample share the same utility function this metric increases in size with increases in the proportion of observations having different tastes and with increasing differences in tastes the author proposes bootstrap methods for estimating the distribution of the test statistic copyright 1995 by mit press

the real exchange rate and macroeconomic performance in sub saharan africa abstract pooled time series and cross section data for 33 countries in sub saharan africa ssa confirm the negative relationship between the real exchange rate rer misalignment and economic performance economic growth imports exports saving and investment macroeconomic instability also slows growth and other indicators of performance higher levels of misalignment are accompanied by higher levels of macroeconomic instability both lower levels of rer misalignment and instability lead to better economic performance the edwards model of rer determination performs well for the region black market premia tend to show a greater degree of misalignment in rer than alternative measures

differential impact of korean banking system reforms on bank productivity abstract we study the impact of banking system reforms during a crisis following a period of undisciplined lending regulatory changes aimed at strengthening the banks capital structure and risk management practices do not have a uniform impact on bank productivity but rather favor financially sound or strategically privileged banks we present evidence documenting the differential impact of regulatory reforms on korean commercial bank productivity over the period 1995 2005 average technical efficiency of banks decreased during the financial crisis of 1997 1998 it improved following the subsequent bank restructuring and continued to improve through 2005 the capital adequacy ratio is positively associated with banks technical efficiency the non performing loans ratio is negatively associated with technical efficiency both relationships are accentuated during the crisis but attenuated after the reforms

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

nonparametric analysis of technical and allocative efficiencies in production in this paper we extend varian s 1984 nonparametric production analysis to situations when the set of observed output input and price data is not consistent with profit maximization for at least one firm in such cases varian s results imply that no production possibility set containing all observations can rationalize the observed data we identify each firm whose performance given the prices faced by it may be found consistent with profit maximization relative to some production possibility set containing all observed output input vectors we show that the set 4 of all such firms can itself be weaklv rationalized in the sense that there exists a closed convex and monotone production possibility set that contains all the observations and relative to which the performance of all the firms in the set 8o is consistent with profit maximization given their respective prices by definition firms not included in this largest set d of efficient observations unambiguously deviate from profit maximizing behavior for any production possibility set containing all observations we follow farrell 1957 and analyze these deviations into technical and allocative efficiency measures considering as admissible all closed convex and monotone production possibility sets relative to which the performance of each firm in the set g remains consistent with profit maximization we then describe nonparametric methods for determining the tightest upper and lower bounds on the technical allocative and aggregate efficiency measures evaluated relative to all such admissible production possibility sets it is seen that the tightest upper bound on the technical efficiency measure is the same as the value computed by the nonparametric efficiency evaluation technique known as data envelopment analysis thus establishing a link between this literature in management science operations research and the nonparametric production analysis in economics

analysis of trends in technical and allocative efficiency an application to texas public school districts abstract we present a new dea based method to analyze efficiency trends over time and differences across subgroups in a panel data setting we employ a result that the aggregate technical and allocative inefficiency score equals the technical inefficiency when input quantities are aggregated into a single total input cost variable and develop test procedures to evaluate the presence of allocative inefficiency we apply these methods to test for the presence of allocative inefficiency in texas school districts over 1993 99 and analyze shifts and trends in both technical and allocative inefficiencies over time for different regions our empirical results indicate the existence of statistically significant allocative inefficiencies while technical inefficiency increased over the six year sample period allocative inefficiency remained relatively stable during this period these results for the full sample obtain also when we repeat the analysis for different regions

real exchange rate behavior and economic performance in ldcs in recent years policy discussions have included increasing references to real exchange rate rer stability and correct exchange rate alignment as crucial conditions to improve economic performance in less developed countries ldcs 1 evidence from latin american asian and african countries is often quoted to support the view that the link between rer behavior and economic performance is strong it is argued that while unstable rers inhibited export growth in some of latin america their stability was fundamental in promoting east asian expansion in many african countries on the other hand persistently misaligned local currencies harmed the development of agriculture reducing domestic food supply 2 but in spite of its importance no empirical work has been attempted either to test the relationship between rer behavior and performance indicators at a broad multicountry level or to investigate the sources of rer variability and misalignment in ldcs the theoretical literature on rer determinants has been recently surveyed by sebastian edwards 3 he distinguishes between equilibrium and disequilibrium rers and between external and domestic rer determinants although domestic policies are often said to account for significant rer variations empirical work has only concentrated on the effect of nominal devaluations4 or speculative crises arising from expansionary monetary policies in a system of fixed ex

the narrow moving band the dutch disease and the competitive consequences of mrs thatcher notes on trade in the presence of dynamic scale economies abstract this paper presents a model of trade in which comparative advantage instead of being determined by underlying attributes of countries evolves over time through learning by doing in this model arbitrary patterns of specialization once established tend to become entrenched over time the model sheds light on three widely held views that do not make sense in more conventional models first is the view that temporary protection of selected sectors can permanently alter the pattern of comparative advantage in the protecting country s favor second is the view that seemingly favorable developments such as the discovery of exportable natural resources may lead to a permanent loss of other sectors and reduce welfare in the long run third is the possibility that a temporary overvaluation of a currency due to tight money can lead to a permanent loss of competitiveness in some sectors

competition in public service provision the role of not for profit providers abstract with public services such as health and education it is not straightforward for consumers to assess the quality of provision many such services are provided by monopoly not for profit providers and there is concern that for profit providers may increase profit at the expense of quality this paper explores the implications of entry by for profit providers when there is unobserved quality the model generates three key policy relevant insights first by developing a novel approach to competition between different organizational forms it frames the relevant trade offs precisely second it shows the value of keeping an incumbent not for profit as an active provider third it characterizes the optimal payment or voucher value to an entrant for each consumer who switches in a way that can be applied empirically

privatization of nippon telegraph and telephone was it a good policy decision nippon telegraph and telephone ntt corporation was privatized in 1985 under the economic assertion that a public enterprise is less efficient and less profitable than a private enterprise this assertion is referred to as the property right theory in economics and it is used as a theoretical rationale for privatizing publicly owned organizations this article empirically examines the economic assertion by comparing ntt s performance before and after its privatization data envelopment analysis dea is used as the research tool in this study which confirmed the economic assertion in terms of production based efficiency measures but it cannot find any major difference in its cost reducing corporate efforts thus this study presents serious management problems occurring within the ntt s partial privatization the partial privatization is now prevailing in the telecommunications industry all over the world this article also discusses the japanese business environment which makes ntt managerially ineffective under its public private joint ownership

measuring economic efficiency with incomplete price information abstract this note identifies and corrects a technical error in t kuosmanen g t post eur j oper res 134 2001 43 58

efficiency effectiveness and productivity of marketing in services abstract how can a service firm right size marketing expenses and yet strive to maximize revenue this paper represents the first attempt to model these efficiency and effectiveness issues using a 49 unit asia pacific hotel chain as illustration we employ a triangular dea model with total expenses controlling for number of rooms as the raw input marketing expenses as intermediate output input and revenues from room rentals and f b as final outputs we infer that efficiency tails off when more than 12 of the budget is expended on marketing activities in terms of effectiveness we find that all the units rated as relatively inefficient can accrue increasing returns to scale in revenues from marketing activities by contrast in the productivity stage linking the raw inputs to the revenues we observe mostly decreasing returns to scale our results highlight the crucial role of marketing in service organizations

a household based nonparametric test of demand theory a nonparametric test of demand theory determining the consistency of price expenditure data with the generalized axiom of revealed preference is applied to household macroeconomic data for the first time the fraction of consumption bundle comparisons that violate the generalized axiom of revealed preference is proposed as a summary statistic to indicate the consistency of a data set with revealed preference axioms this violation rate is calculated among consumption pairs with similar expenditures to increase the power of the test the results suggest that similar households consumption choices and budget constraints are generally consistent with the joint hypotheses of optimizing behavior and common preferences copyright 1995 by mit press

the law of one price in data envelopment analysis restricting weight flexibility across firms abstract the law of one price loop states that all firms face the same prices for their inputs and outputs under market equilibrium taken here as a normative condition for efficiency prices this law has powerful implications for productive efficiency analysis which have remained unexploited thus far this paper shows how loop based weight restrictions can be incorporated in data envelopment analysis dea utilizing the relation between industry level and firm level cost efficiency measures we propose to apply a set of input prices that is common for all firms and that maximizes the cost efficiency of the industry our framework allows for firm specific output weights and for variable returns to scale and preserves the linear programming structure of the standard dea we apply the proposed methodology to the evaluation of the research efficiency of economics departments of dutch universities this application shows that the methodology is computationally tractable for practical efficiency analysis and that it helps in deepening the dea analysis

disaggregated capital flows and developing countries competitiveness summary attracting capital and foreign exchange flows is crucial for developing countries yet these flows could lead to real exchange rate appreciation and may thus have detrimental effects on competitiveness jeopardizing exports and growth we investigate this dilemma by comparing the impact of six types of flows on real exchange rate behavior in a sample of 57 developing countries covering africa europe asia latin america and the middle east the results reveal that portfolio investments foreign borrowing aid and income lead to real exchange rate appreciation while remittances have disparate effects across regions foreign direct investments have no effect on the real exchange rate contributing to resolve the above dilemma

piecewise loglinear estimation of efficient production surfaces linear programming formulations for piecewise loglinear estimation of efficient production surfaces are derived from a set of basic properties postulated for the underlying production possibility sets unlike the piecewise linear model of banker charnes and cooper banker r d a charnes w w cooper 1984 models for the estimation of technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis management sci 30 september 1078 1092 this approach permits the identification of increasing marginal products and estimation of the classical s shaped production functions methods are also provided for estimating technical inefficiencies and other production characteristics such as rates of substitution and transformation marginal products returns to scale and most productive scale sizes on the basis of observed production data the results of a simulation study are reported to illustrate the usefulness of this estimation method in empirical applications when there are a priori reasons to expect increasing marginal products in some regions of the production function a modified model is provided to extend this analysis to the situation of non competing outputs addressed by the bi extremal model of banker charnes cooper and schinnar banker r d a charnes w w cooper a schinnar 1981 a bi extremal principle for frontier estimation and efficiency evaluation management sci 27 december 1370 1382

an overall measure of technical inefficiency at the firm and at the industry level the lost profit on outlay abstract as a measure of overall technical inefficiency the directional distance function ddf introduced by chambers chung and fare ties the potential output expansion and input contraction together through a single parameter by duality the ddf is related to a measure of profit inefficiency which is calculated as the normalized deviation between optimal and actual profit at market prices as we show in the most usual case the associated normalization represents the sum of the actual revenue and the actual cost of the assessed firm consequently the corresponding profit inefficiency measure associated with the ddf has no obvious economic interpretation in contrast in this paper we allow outputs to expand and inputs to contract by different proportions this results in a modified ddf that retains most of the properties of the original ddf the corresponding dual problem has a much simpler interpretation as the lost profit on average outlay that can be decomposed into a technical and an allocative inefficiency component in addition an overall measure of technical inefficiency at the industry level is introduced resorting to the direction corresponding to the average input output bundle

alternative methods for environmentally adjusted productivity analysis abstract advances in the productivity with which food is produced around the world have been made possible through the intensive use of industrial inputs that have important environmental impacts like standard measures of macroeconomic performance however commonly used measures of agricultural efficiency and productivity account only for marketed commodities and inputs but ignore the environmental effects of these production processes a more complete analysis of trends in the sector s productivity requires the use of models that incorporate these environmental effects to provide better measures of the contributions of the sector from the social point of view this paper compares the conceptual merits and empirical performance of alternative approaches that can be employed for this purpose input distance functions output distance functions nonparametric methods and index number approaches each of the methods has relative strengths and weaknesses the methods are empirically illustrated using data from the canadian pulp and paper industry

the anarchy of numbers aid development and cross country empirics the recent literature contains many stories of how foreign aid affects economic growth aid raises growth in countries with good policies or with difficult economic environments or outside the tropics or on average but with diminishing returns the diversity of the results suggests that many are fragile seven important aid growth papers are tested for robustness using 14 minimally arbitrary tests deriving mainly from differences among the studies themselves this approach investigates the importance of potentially arbitrary specification choices while minimizing the arbitrariness in testing choices all of the results appear fragile especially to sample expansion

a generalized distance function and the analysis of production efficiency a generalization of shephard s distance functions is proposed extending the usefulness of distance functions in economic analysis applications to efficiency measurements and productivity analysis are presented new indexes of productivity and technical allocative and scale efficiency are proposed and analyzed interpretation of these indexes in terms of ray average cost ray average revenue and cost to revenue ratio is discussed

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

economic efficiency and frontier techniques abstract most of the literature related to the measurement of economic efficiency has based its analysis either on parametric or on non parametric frontier methods the choice of estimation method has been an issue of debate with some researchers preferring the parametric and others the non parametric approach the aim of this paper is to provide a critical and detailed review of both core frontier methods in our opinion no approach is strictly preferable to any other moreover a careful consideration of their main advantages and disadvantages of the data set utilized and of the intrinsic characteristics of the framework under analysis will help us in the correct implementation of these techniques recent developments in frontier techniques and economic efficiency measurement such as bayesian techniques bootstrapping duality theory and the analysis of sampling asymptotic properties are also considered in this paper

a goal programming method of stochastic allocative data envelopment analysis abstract allocative data envelopment analysis adea is a version of data envelopment analysis dea which measures relative efficiency for a group of similar operating units with known input prices by using the actual input values adea provides information to managers on the minimum cost method of operation for each unit a major criticism of dea methods is that they are deterministic and have no means of allowing for uncertainty this paper applies the goal programming approach introduced by banker 1991 to allocative efficiency and develops the stochastic adea model a two stage solution method is introduced which is needed because of the existence of alternate optimal solutions regarding which units are found to be significantly inefficient we propose that identifying the significantly inefficient units is most useful to managers because it best facilitates improved efficiency the concept of a minimum frontier is introduced and used to define the significantly inefficient units we also show how bounds can be imposed which allow the ambiguity of the noise inefficiency trade off to be eliminated from the objective function the use of bounds also allows the identification of the significantly inefficient unit based on the amount of uncertainty present for each operating unit as a result of optimizing cost this method has the important advantage of being ideally suited for multiple outputs