multinational operation ownership and efficiency differences in the international oil industry abstract although state involvement in market systems often leads to inefficiency this influence in the oil industry is not dwindling due to strong growth of some state oil companies based on this background there are concerns about how state firms can continue to stay relevant in the international oil industry by offsetting inefficiencies due to state control this study assesses the effects of multinational operations on the performance of oil firms this is achieved by comparing productive and scale efficiencies of state and private oil companies as well as state multinationals and private multinationals a dataset of 50 firms each year from 2001 to 2010 reveals that although multinational operation is important in reducing productive inefficiencies of state firms it does not mitigate scale inefficiencies of state owned firms state firms should therefore make multinational operations a key policy direction since this will provide a transformative agenda towards equally competing with their private counterparts however better efforts need to be paid in reducing scale inefficiencies that are pervasive among state owned oil firms providing better controls on firm size will provide better drive towards future efficient production levels

deregulation consolidation and efficiency evidence from the spanish insurance industry this paper provides new information on the effects of deregulation and consolidation in financial services markets by analyzing the spanish insurance industry the sample period 1989 98 spans the introduction of the european union s eu third generation insurance directives which deregulated the eu insurance market deregulation has led to dramatic changes in the spanish insurance market the number of firms declined by 35 average firm size increased by 275 and unit prices declined significantly in both life and non life insurance we analyze the causes and effects of consolidation using modern frontier efficiency analysis to estimate cost technical and allocative efficiency as well as using malmquist analysis to measure total factor productivity tfp change the results show that many small inefficient and financially underperforming firms were eliminated from the market due to insolvency or liquidation as a result the market experienced significant growth in tfp over the sample period consolidation not only reduced the number of firms operating with increasing returns to scale but also increased the number operating with decreasing returns to scale hence many large firms should focus on improving efficiency by adopting best practices rather than on further growth

state regulation and the structure conduct efficiency and performance of us auto insurers abstract this research investigates the impact of regulation on state automobile insurance markets while controlling for other state insurance market characteristics that may be related to performance data for a large sample of insurers are analyzed the results suggest that insurers in competitive and non stringently regulated states may benefit from market power by charging higher unit prices however insurers in these states are on average more cost x efficient and cost x efficient insurers charge lower prices and earn smaller profits the empirical results also suggest that insurers in some rate regulated states are less revenue and cost scale efficient than in competitive states

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

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

estimating wage discrimination in the labor market if labor supply curves are not perfectly inelastic wage discrimination induces some minority workers to leave the labor force studies of discrimination that focus only on wage differentials overlook these disincentive effects on minority employment

anti discrimination or reverse discrimination the impact of changing demographics title vii and affirmative action on productivity this study estimates the changes over time in the relative productivities of minorities and females i find no significant evidence that the productivity of minorities or females decreased relative to that of white males as relative minority and female employment increased during the 1960s and 1970s this study also compares the impact of title vii and affirmative action and presents evidence that title vii litigation has played a significant role in increasing black employment this suggests that the employment of minorities and females has not entailed large efficiency costs and that title vii litigation has had some success in fighting racial discrimination the eeoc has sometimes been credited with opening up new pools of labor that corporations somehow contrived to ignore and occasionally with hastening the breakdown of traditional barriers to labor mobility but in the context of the market s endless search for efficiency these anomalies would have been eliminated anyway leaving only the question of whether they were worth the expenditures compelled by law affirmative action is a net cost to the economy and the true dynamic effects the opportunity cost of all this expense and effort the diminution of competition inefficiencies due to the employment and promotion of marginal labor and the consequent demoralization of good workers can only be a matter of conjecture although they are clearly the most important of all senator orrin hatch 1980

costly monitoring financial intermediation and equilibrium credit rationing abstract this paper establishes a link between equilibrium credit rationing and financial intermediation in a model with asymmetrically informed lenders and borrowers costly monitoring and investment project indivisibilities intermediation is shown to dominate borrowing and lending between individuals and these financial intermediaries exhibit several of the important features of intermediaries as we know them equilibrium interest rates and the aggregate quantity of loans respond quite differently to changes in taste and technology parameters depending on whether or not there is rationing in equilibrium

sex related wage differentials and women s interrupted labor careers the chicken or the egg wage differentials between men and women are often attributed to differences in on the job training the lower investment of women being explained by their plans to interrupt their careers for family reasons career interruptions however are often explained by low wages to trace this interrelationship i adopt a simultaneous equations approach trying to explain wages planned separations on the job training and the skill intensity of the job simultaneously skill intensity is found to be a key variable in the explanation of the wage differential traditional theory is hard pressed to explain the sex related differences in this variable

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

the trend in the male female wage gap in the united states despite the rise in the feminist movement the enactment of equal opportunity legislation and the rapid increase in women s labor force participation a substantial sex differential in wages has persisted in the united states for at least 4 decades measured by hourly earnings of year round workers this wage gap was 31 in 1955 widened to a 35 37 range by the 1960s and early 1970s and then narrowed to 33 by 1982 this paper examines the extent to which changes in the characteristics of men and women in the labor force and other factors can account for the observed pattern the main finding is that increases in women s labor force participation were initially associated with a declining skill level of employed women relative to employed men where skill is measured by years of schooling and job tenure more recently the work experience of employed women has been increasing which helps account for the recent narrowing trend in the wage gap during the 1970s the wage gap probably woul have narrowed m

single market effects on productivity in the german insurance industry abstract the single market project of the european commission was supposed to foster productivity growth in the financial service industry we assess its consequences on productivity development in the german insurance industry one of the largest insurance markets within the european union by applying data envelopment analysis to a panel of german insurance companies we estimate standard and bootstrapped efficiency scores for the years 1991 through 2006 and apply a test on scale efficiency based on bootstrapped statistics furthermore we compute a malmquist index and test for different types of productivity convergence across firms

under pressure how the business environment affects productivity and efficiency of european life insurance companies deregulation and widespread economic changes have fundamentally affected the business environment of european life insurance companies over the last decades we apply multi stage data envelopment analysis to identify the impact of the changing environment on productivity and efficiency of european life insurance companies considering a sample of 970 life insurance companies from 14 european countries we show that general economic capital market and insurance market conditions are important drivers of efficiency although we find no technical change in the european life insurance sector we nonetheless observe an efficiency increase in 2002 2013 that leads to an increase in total factor productivity these trends can be explained by more challenging business conditions in the 2000s our results emphasize the need to control for the business environment in cross country efficiency studies

trends in earnings differentials by gender 1971 1981 this paper clarifies trends in relative earnings by sex over the decade 1971 1981 and decomposes these trends to determine which factors contributed to a decline and which to an increase our analyses are based upon data from the annual demographic files of the current population survey for 1972 and 1982 this study is unique in that it estimates earnings functions in each year which are corrected for selectivity bias it is found that such a correction markedly raises the progress of white women relative to men among blacks the impact of the selectivity bias correction was to substantially lower the relative earnings increase of women however the coefficients on the selectivity variable were not significant the findings suggest declining sex role specialization and discrimination as conventionally measured over the decade on the other hand contrary to expectations the total effect of variables reflecting the sex composition of the individuals occupation worked to widen the sex differential over the period the sex differential was also adversely affected by a decline in the relative return to education especially for whites authors modified

intercountry comparisons of labor force trends and of related developments an overview this paper is a survey of analyses of women s labor force growth in 12 industrialized countries originally presented at a conference in sussex england in june 1983 the main focus of the conference papers and of the current survey is on growth of the labor force of married women in the years 1960 80 trends in fertility wages and family instability also receive attention as related developments married women s labor force growth is observed in all countries except for the ussr after 1970 where labor force rates of women reached the level of men growth rates differ among countries they apparently respond to growth in real wages and to growth in education but response elasticities differ among countries estimates of these elasticities contained in the country papers were helpful in predicting the trends other findings include ubiquitous declines in fertility and growth of divorce in the 1970s both developments are related to long run labor force growth in all countries wages of women were lo

the robustness of output measures in property liability insurance efficiency studies abstract we empirically examine two methods for measuring output in property liability insurer efficiency studies the value added approach and the flow or financial intermediation approach the approaches are not mutually consistent the value added approach is closely related to traditional measures of firm performance but the flow approach is not in addition efficient value added approach firms are less likely to go insolvent while firms characterized as efficient by the flow approach are generally more likely to fail we also find that the theoretical concern regarding the value added approach s use of losses as a measure of output is not validated empirically

affirmative action and labor markets affirmative action remains controversial the controversy extends from the original antidiscrimination legislation and its interpretation to estimates of affirmative action s effect on the labor market this paper provides a progress report on our recent efforts at detecting the effects of affirmative action on minority wages and employment although we find a substantial increase in wages for black men and black women over our sample period the timing of these wage changes is surprising most of the wage gains came prior to 1974 before the establishment of an effective monitoring structure for affirmative action indeed when the powers of the eeoc and ofcc are greatest the wage effects for young blacks are somewhat perverse using eeo 1 reports we find a major shift in black employment toward firms most vulnerable to the monitoring and potential sanctions of the affirmative action programs as with wages the shift in minority employment came prior to the expansion of the powers and budgets of the ee

sex discrimination and product market competition the case of the banking industry this paper examines the relationship between product market competition and employment discrimination using an especially constructed data set that links microeconomic data on female employment with measures of market concentration in the banking industry the use of firm specific data drawn from this one industry allows estimation of this relationship in a manner that avoids the problems of interindustry differences that have troubled previous studies the results provide strong support for a negative relationship between market concentration and the relative employment of women further we find that individual market shares are unrelated to female employment suggesting that the relationship is due primarily to differences across markets rather than individual firms

the effect of britain s anti discriminatory legislation on relative pay and employment pressive increase in the number of women in the labour force during the i970s between i970 and i980 female relative employment increased by i8 3 and female relative hours by i 7 6 in this paper we attempt an evaluation of the possible effects of anti discriminatory legislation by considering the labour market as a whole taking into account not only relative employment but also other factors that through their influence on demand and supply may have affected relative pay the prima facie evidence in favour of the effectiveness of this legislation is very strong and we want to see if this evidence is maintained after considering all these additional factors and their interaction within the context of the labour market in the first section we present the main facts under analysis the analytical framework to consider the joint effect of the legislation on pay and employment and the

comparable worth limited coverage and the exacerbation of inequality citing relevant judicial decisions the author argues that any application of the comparable worth remedy for gender discrimination is likely to cover only certain groups of workers most likely to be covered are women who work for governmental or large private employers in female dominated jobs and least likely to be covered are women who work for small private employers the implementation of comparable worth would cause the wages of noncovered workers to fall relative to those of covered workers and they might even fall absolutely an analysis of 1979 current population survey data suggests that the women most likely to gain from comparable worth are fewer in number better paid and subjected to no greater discrimination than the women most likely to lose

an investigation into sexual orientation discrimination as an explanation for wage differences this study explores the effects of sexual orientation on earnings it is found that ceteris paribus men living with male partners tend to earn less than other men and women living with female partners tend to earn more than other women these earnings differentials tend to vary by region they also vary by education and occupation for men and with the presence of minor children for women in addition the age earnings profiles of women living with female partners tend to be higher flatter and less concave than those of other women

gender differences in observed and offered wages in canada 1980 according to the 1981 census of canada the female rate of pay is 30 percent less than the male rate the average female wage offer however is only around one half of that received by males other things being equal slightly more than one half of the difference in observed wages can be explained by diffe rences in wage related characteristics between males and females two fifths of the disparity between wage offers can be explained by the same set of factors analysis of the distribution of wage offers indicates greater wage inequality in the canadian labor market than suggested by study of observed wages

employers discriminatory behavior and the estimation of wage discrimination this paper considers the linkage of empirical estimates of wage discrimination between two groups introduced by oaxaca 1973 to a theoretical model of employers discriminatory behavior it is shown that conditional on different assumptions about employers discriminatory tastes oaxaca s estimators of wage discrimination can be derived that the approach is more generally useful is demonstrated by deriving an alternative estimator of wage discrimination based on the assumption that within each type of labor e g unskilled skilled the utility function capturing employers discriminatory tastes is homogeneous of degree zero with respect to labor inputs from each of the two groups the estimators are compared empirically in an application to male female wage differentials

male female wage differentials and policy responses without implicating them for any of the contents of the paper i am grateful to the following for helpful discussions or comments andrea beller university of illinois david bloom harvard and columnbia glen cain university of wisconsin ron ehrenberg cornell victor fuchs stanford bob gregory australian national university jonathan leonard university of california berkeley roberta robb brock university and paul weiler harvard financial support of the humanities and social sciences committee of the research board of the universitu of toronto is eratefullu acknowlede ed

an efficiency comparison of the non life insurance industry in the bric countries abstract we analyze the efficiency of non life insurance companies in four of the fastest growing markets in the world the bric brazil russia india china countries an innovative feature of this paper is its incorporation of uncontrollable variables in the efficiency analysis using multi stage data envelopment analysis dea this approach captures cross country differences such as the political and economic environment and allows distinguishing between managerial inefficiency and inefficiency due to environmental conditions we find that the environment affects the efficiency of non life insurers operating in the bric countries furthermore in a regression of firm characteristics on efficiency scores we identify four drives of efficiency size profitability solvency and ownership form the results further our understanding of the insurance industry in the bric countries in regard to its efficiency and the environment in which it operates

his and hers gender differences in work and income 1959 1979 this paper describes changes in hours of work and income between 1959 and 1979 of women and men ages 25 64 it includes attempts to measure and value nonmarket production and leisure as well as market work to take account of possible income sharing within households and to allow for economies of scale in household production the most important empirical result is that relative to men women s access to goods and services and leisure was lower in 1979 than in 1959 changes in hourly earnings hours of work and household structure contributed to this result the sex differential in hourly earnings is explored in detail

incorporating the causes of occupational differences in studies of racial wage differentials this study provides a basic framework for incorporating the causes of occupational differences into analyses of racial wage differentials separating the influences of personal characteristics occupational choice and hiring discrimination on occupational attainment provides measures of the contributions of each to the racial pay gap the paper also considers the potential for bias in the wage equation estimates arising from self selection into occupations there are two generalfindings first correcting for self selection increases the importance of occupational distribution in explaining racial wage differentials second a proper accounting of the causes of these occupational differences yields discrimination measures that are higher than those that arise when occupational dummy variables are included in the wage equations and all the difference in occupational distribution is treated as nondiscriminatory

salary differentials by sex in the academic labor market this paper examines faculty time allocation decisions that are fundamental to the functioning of a university a random utility approach yields a grouped data multinomial logit model and predicts that time allocation decisions depend systematically on

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

insurance companies in mozambique a two stage dea and neural networks on efficiency and capacity slacks this article analyses the efficiency of mozambique insurance companies using a dea model two dea models are used and a bootstrap approach adopted furthermore the efficiency scores are predicted based on neural networks the results reveal that mozambique insurance companies output increasing potentials are severely constrained particularly in terms of the ceded reinsurance increasing potentials policy implications are derived

comparable worth wage adjustments and female employment in the state and local sector our paper simulates the likely effects of a comparable worth wage adjustment policy in the state and local sector on female employment in the sector the simulation is based on estimates of within occupation male female substitution and across occupation occupational employment substitution that we obtain using data from the 1980 census of population