generalized travel cost model and water quality benefits a reconsideration with federal agencies required to conduct benefit cost analyses for each new major regulation analyses of water quality changes are likely to be an increasingly important part of the policymaking process a revised version of the travel cost demand model and illustrations show the importance of these revisions for the model s estimates although the magnitude of the difference in benefit estimates between the original and new versions of the model varies with the specific recreation site selected the findings indicate that the original model generally implied estimated benefits from three to over 30 times as large as the revised model this implies that judgment can play an important role in the definition and use of economic models as well as the need for better information on households recreation decisions and more complete description of recreation site characteristics 15 references 4 tables

inequalities and the individualization of wealth abstract we document the individualization of wealth in france between 1998 and 2015 using precise survey data on the property titles of assets it is characterized by an increase in the share of wealth which is individualized by spouses vs jointly owned and by an increase in the share of wealth held by singles we show that the usual measures of wealth inequality which allocate the same share of household wealth to each spouse or partner overestimate the share of wealth held by women this results in an underestimation of both the level and the growth of a wealth inequality between individuals and b the gender wealth gap we argue for better consideration of the ownership status and intra household distribution of wealth in the measurement of wealth inequality

a nonparametric cost approach to scale efficiency starting with farrell fieldhouse 1962 a host of notiparametric models have been developed for calculation of scale efficiency a common property of these models is that they are specified in terms of input output data duality theory has taught us that technological characteristics may be analyzed from either the primal or the dual cost side the purpose of this paper is to introduce a nonparametric dual method of calculating scale efficiency

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

theoretical and empirical specifications issues in travel cost demand studies the ultimate objective of empirical travel cost demand studies is to obtain an estimate of the welfare derived from utilizing outdoor recreational resources thus it is apparent that travel cost demand equations must be linked to utility maximization deyak and smith freeman bockstael and mcconnell hanemann bockstael hanemann and strand we specify a model of utilitymaximizing recreation demand behavior which postulates that individuals choose the total number of days that they wish to spend at the recreation site this total number of recreation days is the product of the number of trips

supply response in ethiopia accounting for technical inefficiency few empirical studies of supply response using the profit function have accounted for technical inefficiency using farm level panel data from ethiopia this study examines the effect of incorporating technical inefficiency in estimating the supply response of peasant farmers two systems of output supply and input demand equations are estimated and compared the conventional model in which technical efficiency is assumed and another in which technical inefficiency is explicitly incorporated the model with technical inefficiency is preferred on grounds of theoretical consistency and improved estimates although model comparison tests are not conclusive incorporation of inefficiency generally increases the magnitudes and the statistical significance of own price elasticities substantially so in the case of fertilizer and fertilizer intensive crops and alters the priority attached to nonprice factors an important result is that only the specification with inefficiency reveals a significant effect of access to extension services on output only this specification finds that output increases with household size which one expects as the farms in the sample are largely subsistence and producing for own consumption furthermore the results demonstrate that farmers response to incentives is considerably restricted by inefficiency suggesting that the traditional model would overstate response by excluding the efficiency variable

arbitrary values good causes and premature verdicts abstract this paper offers an alternative interpretation of the conclusions kahneman and knetsch propose based on two contingent valuation cvm surveys the evaluation argues that while framing is important to cvm estimates the design implementation and empirical findings reported from these surveys do not support their judgments moreover with the exception of temporal embedding conventional economic descriptions of individual behavior can explain the response patterns that they suggest are at variance with standard value theory

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

barriers to efficiency and the privatization of township village enterprises abstract qian 2000 and others suggest that post 1994 tax and banking reforms in china combined with the development of markets for allocating resources influenced the economic performance of township village enterprises tves and private enterprises pes this paper uses chinese provincial level data to search for evidence of advantages and or disadvantages offered to tves and pes before and after the 1994 reforms we define a sectoral net income based measure of overall efficiency and decompose the measure into components that highlight the existence of credit constraints output target constraints and labour hiring constraints the results offer empirical support for qian and others explanation of why private enterprises eventually emerged as the dominant institution for allocating resources in post 1994 rural china

precision of dichotomous choice contingent valuation welfare measures some simulation results the purpose of this research is to examine the roles of individuals heterogeneous economic factors and model misspecification in dichotomous choice contingent valuation welfare measurement willingness to pay for an improvement of environmental quality is studied simulation results indicate that the precision of welfare estimates increases with individuals income levels and decreases with the price of the quality related good the dependence of the consumption of the quality related good on the environmental quality also affects the reliability of welfare estimates

estimation of returns to scale using data envelopment analysis a comment banker 1984 introduced the idea that the sum of the intensity variables in the dea activity analysis model can be used to identify returns to scale a counterexample in chang and guh 1991 shows that banker s method may fail this prompted banker and thrall 1992 to develop an alternative approach to estimate scale efficiency using dea seemingly unaware of the work by byrnes fare and grosskopf 1984 fare grosskopf and lovell 1985 1994 and fare and grosskopf 1985 etc on the same topic their new approach is very similar to the methodology originated in these references the purpose of this comment is to make our method known and to contrast it to the banker and thrall 1992 approach

long and short run non parametric cost frontier efficiency an application to spanish savings banks the utilisation rate of installed capacity is a popular concept in both the performance appraisal literature and in publications on industrial organisation however a common consensus has yet to be reached concerning the most appropriate way to measure the capacity utilisation of physical inputs and its final effect on company results on the one hand there are approaches that establish capacity utilisation with reference to the maximum level of production that can be achieved in contrast there are other approaches more strictly related to economic analysis of operating costs in this paper our main objective is to define an analytical process that uses non parametric frontier methodology to provide the distance between the total costs of a given unit and the short run frontier costs as a natural extension of this proposal it is possible to compute the short run inefficiency caused by a non optimal dimension of the fixed inputs we define this as capacityefficiency the proposed evaluation process is applied to spanish savings banks covering the period between 1986 and 1995 throughout the period analysed the greater part of cost inefficiency is due to capacity efficiency 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

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

the structure of technical efficiency it is common practice to decompose measures of efficiency into component measures of technical and allocative efficiency in this paper we show how and why to decompose a general measure of technical efficiency into component measures of purely technical efficiency congestion and scale efficiency and we investigate the properties of each measure we do so for a multiple output technology which satisfies a weak axiom system that does not include either constant returns to scale or strong input disposability

estimating recreation demand using the properties of the implied consumer surplus consumer surplus estimates are random variables while they are generally recognized as stochastic little attention was given to their properties prior to bockstael and strand s 1987 evaluation of conventional practices for using recreation demand models in benefit measurement their paper as well as all the research it stimulated adopted a similar strategy namely to judge the methods for estimating demand or random utility models based on the properties of their respective consumer surplus estimates this paper proposes a different strategy to define estimators based on the properties of their implied consumer surplus estimates this type of argument is not new and usually is associated with the rationale offered for bayesian estimators 2 however the motivation for the estimator proposed here can be based on minimizing the mean squared error of the consumer surplus estimates moreover it can be constructed from the statistics usually reported with ordinary least squares ols estimates

board structure and firm technical efficiency evidence from canadian state owned enterprises abstract the objective of the study is to analyze the board performance relationship for a group of 14 canadian soes this context is unique because soes do not have major control devices other than the board as the interaction effect if any between the board and other corporate governance structures is expected to be low we do not have to fully control for the potential impact of different control devices or to disentangle them completely from influencing board composition the performance is also measured using data envelopment analysis dea a linear programming method used for the first time in this research area as such this study contributes to the operational research literature while applying dea method to untraditional fields of research the results from the multivariate analysis suggest that board size and board independence are positively related to firm technical efficiency only when soes are exposed to market discipline in other words product market competition is a precondition for boards to be effective

value and quantity data in economic and technical efficiency measurement this paper calls attention to the implications of using value data in efficiency measurement through data envelopment analysis dea the main contributions are twofold i it provides a reconciliation of the previous literature on analysing issues of quantity and value data in efficiency measurement ii it provides some guidelines on what to do when these issues arise in a data set

marginal values and returns to scale for nonparametric production frontiers we present a unifying linear programming approach to the calculation of various directional derivatives for a very large class of production frontiers of data envelopment analysis dea special cases of this include different marginal rates the scale elasticity and a spectrum of partial and mixed elasticity measures our development applies to any polyhedral production technology including to name a few the conventional variable and constant returns to scale dea technologies their extensions with weight restrictions technologies with weakly disposable undesirable outputs and network dea models furthermore our development provides a general method for characterization of returns to scale rts in any polyhedral technology the new approach effectively removes the need to develop bespoke models for the rts characterization and calculation of marginal rates and elasticity measures for each particular technology

taxing across borders tracking personal wealth and corporate profits globalization is making it increasingly easy for corporations to shift profits to low tax countries modern technology has also made it simpler for wealthy individuals to move funds to undeclared bank accounts in offshore tax havens both issues have featured prominently in the news and global economic debates since the financial crisis but the arguments tend to be based on relatively little empirical evidence measuring the costs of tax havens to foreign governments is fraught with difficulties however balance of payments data and corporate filings show that us companies are shifting profits to bermuda luxembourg and similar countries on a large and growing scale about 20 percent of all us corporate profits are now booked in such havens a tenfold increase since the 1980s this profit shifting is typically done within the letter of the law and thus would be best described as tax avoidance rather than fraud i attempt to quantify its cost for government coffers by taking a fresh look at the most recent macroeconomic evidence and combining it in a systematic manner over the last 15 years the effective corporate tax rate of us companies has declined from 30 to 20 percent and about two thirds of this decline can be attributed to increased profit shifting to low tax jurisdictions wealthy individuals too use tax havens sometimes legally to benefit from banking services not available in their home country and sometimes illegally to evade taxes a number of changes have sought with some success to curb that form of tax evasion over the last years yet the available evidence from switzerland and

the missing wealth of nations are europe and the u s net debtors or net creditors this paper shows that official statistics substantially underestimate the net foreign asset positions of rich countries because they fail to capture most of the assets held by households in offshore tax havens drawing on systematic anomalies in portfolio investment positions and a unique swiss dataset i find that 8 of the global financial wealth of households is held in tax havens 6 of which goes unrecorded on the basis of plausible assumptions accounting for unrecorded assets turns the eurozone officially the world s second largest net debtor into a net creditor it also reduces the u s net debt significantly the results shed new light on global imbalances and challenge the widespread view that after a decade of poor to rich capital flows external assets are now in poor countries and debts in rich countries i provide concrete proposals to improve international investment statistics

investment crowding out firm level evidence from northern germany michalek j ciaian p and kancs d a investment crowding out firm level evidence from northern germany regional studies the main objective of this paper is to estimate the extent to which firm investment is substituted crowded out by investment support policies granted under the european union rural development programme rdp the empirical analyses employed the difference in difference propensity score matching approach which allows several important sources of bias to be addressed such as selection bias simultaneity bias and functional form misspecification from which many previous studies suffer using panel data of 1333 firms from the schleswig holstein region in germany it is found that the crowding out effect of the rdp is close to 100 implying that firms use public support to substitute for private investments furthermore no evidence was found that due to the rdp programme support firms would have brought forward their investments planned originally for a later period rejecting t

agricultural externalities and environmental regulation evaluating good practice in citrus production economic activity takes place in a scenario characterized by an increasing number of environmental regulations aimed at bringing under control the emission of contaminating wastes in this paper we evaluate the impact of transforming a code of good practice in nitrogen fertilization on spanish citrus fruit farms into an environmental regulation of compulsory fulfilment using data envelopment techniques we calculate unrestricted and environmentally regulated short run maximum profits both profit values are then used to compute an index of the cost of regulation our results suggest that the cost of shifting from a merely recommended practice to a binding rule is low on average the loss of profit computed is only about 4 furthermore we find that farms overall efficiency is low and that the current gap between observed and regulated fertilization practices could be overcome by improving overall management efficiency

on the long run evolution of inheritance france 1820 2050 this paper attempts to document and account for the long run evolution of inheritance we find that in a country like france the annual flow of inheritance was about 20 25 of national income between 1820 and 1910 down to less than 5 in 1950 and back up to about 15 by 2010 a simple theoretical model of wealth accumulation growth and inheritance can fully account for the observed u shaped pattern and levels using this model we find that under plausible assumptions the annual bequest flow might reach about 20 25 of national income by 2050 this corresponds to a capitalized bequest share in total wealth accumulation well above 100 our findings illustrate the fact that when the growth rate g is small and when the rate of return to private wealth r is permanently and substantially larger than the growth rate say r 4 5 vs g 1 2 which was the case in the 19th century and early 20th century and is likely to happen again in the 21st century then past wealth and inheritance are bound to play a key role for aggregate wealth accumulation and the structure of lifetime inequality contrarily to a widely spread view modern economic growth did not kill inheritance

nonparametric estimation of education productivity incorporating nondiscretionary inputs with an application to dutch schools in this paper we develop a malmquist productivity index for public sector production characterized by the influence of environmental variables we extend johnson and ruggiero 2011 to the more general case of variable returns to scale to further decompose the malmquist productivity index into technical efficiency scale and environmental change we apply our model to analyze productivity of dutch schools using 2002 2007 data the results indicate that the environment influences the productivity index as well as the technical efficiency scale and environmental change components we see that schools with a moderate classification of environment have the highest productivity numbers in line with expectations schools with the worst environment also perform worse and would perform better with an improved environment

property rights in a fishery regulatory change and firm performance a new method is introduced and applied to the british columbia halibut fishery to analyze changes in productivity of firms harvesting a natural capital stock the index number technique decomposes the contributions of output prices variable input prices fixed inputs and productivity to firm profits adjusted for changes in the natural capital stock an application of the method is given using micro level data from a common pool resource the indexes provide a ready made comparison of all firms to the most profitable firm per unit of resource stock benchmarking with the decompositions also allows firms and regulators to improve overall industry performance by allowing them to analyze what components are contributing most to relative economic profits

average cost efficiency and optimal scale sizes in non parametric analysis under fairly general assumptions requiring neither a differentiable frontier nor a constant returns to scale technology this paper introduces a new definition of an optimal scale size based on the minimization of unit costs the corresponding measure average cost efficiency combines scale and allocative efficiency and generalizes the measurement of scale economies in efficiency analysis while providing a performance criterion which is stricter than both cost efficiency and scale efficiency measurement the average cost efficiency is not reliant upon the uniformity of the firms input price vector and we supply procedures to compute it in both convex and non convex production technologies empirical illustration of the theoretical results is given with reference to large sets of production units

dea duality on returns to scale rts in production and cost analyses an occurrence of multiple solutions and differences between production based and cost based rts estimates this article discusses the concept of rts returns to scale in the framework of dea data envelopment analysis production and cost analyses focusing on an occurrence of multiple solutions and how to deal with such a difficulty dual relationships between production based and cost based rts estimates are also theoretically discussed in this study

exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss consumer s surplus is a widely used tool in applied welfare economics both economic theorists and cost benefit analysis often use consumer s surplus despite its somewhat dubious reputation the basic idea is to evaluate the value to a consumer or his willingness to pay for a change in price of a good from say pricep to pricep because price changes affect consumer welfare an evaluation of this effect is often a key input to public policy decisions yet consumer s surplus is probably the most controversial of widely used economic concepts both paul samuelson and ian little conclude that the economics profession would be better off without it it is my feeling of the situation that substantial agreement exists on the correct quantities to be measured the amount the consumer would pay or would need to be paid to be just as well off after the price change as he was before the price change the quantities correspond to john hicks compensating variation measures an alternative measure which takes ex post price change utility as the basis of comparison is hicks equivalent variation the controversy arises in the measurement of these quantities the usual measurement procedure is to use the area to the left of the marshallian market demand curve between two price levels jules dupuit originated this measure of welfare change and alfred marshall and hicks derived appropriate conditions for its use the primary condition for the area to the left of the demand curve to correspond to the compensating variation is to have constant marginal utility of income marshall gave this condition and if it holds the same quantity will be derived as the area to the left of the compensated hicksian demand curve this area to the left of the compensated demand curve is exactly what the compensating variation and equivalent variation measure thus the constant marginal utility of income is a sufficient condition for marshallian consumer s surplus to be equal to hicks consumer s surplus in this case arnold harberger s plea to use the welfare triangle as one half times the product of the price change times the quantity change to measure deadweight loss corresponds to the correct theoretical amount of welfare change in a recent paper robert willig derives bounds for the percentage difference between the correct measure of either the compensating or equivalent variation and the marshallian measure derived form the market demand curve his bounds which depend on the income elasticity of demand for the single good in the region of price change being considered as well as the proportion of the consumer s income spent on the good demonstrate that the marshallian consumer s surplus is often a good approximation to hicks consumer s surplus the fact that the proportion of the consumer s income spent matters as well as the income elasticity was first pointed out by harold hotelling willig contends that the approximation error will be less than the errors involved in estimating the demand curve thus he hopes to remove the need for apology that applied economists often need to give to theorists who remark on the inappropriateness of using marshallian consumer s surplus to measure welfare change however in this paper i show that for the case primarily considered by willig of a single price change which is also the situation in which consumer s surplus is often used in applied work no approximation is necessary professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research associate national bureau of economic research i would like to thank peter diamond erwin diewert daniel mcfadden robert merton robert solow hal varian joel yellin and the referees for help and comments research support from the national science foundation is acknowledged the reason that we still have two rather than one of samuelson s six measures of consumer s surplus arises from an index number problem of the correct basis for the welfare comparison i will give both measures but plan to concentrate on the compensating variation

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

data envelopment analysis on a relaxed set of assumptions data envelopment analysis is a procedure for evaluation of the relative efficiency of units in a production system dea involves construction of composite units as convex combinations of other units inputs and outputs under various conditions related to returns to scale the assumption of convexity is inconsistent with increasing returns to scale and not implied by constant or non increasing returns to scale an alternative dea approach which does not invoke the assumption of a convex production possibility set is developed in this paper it is implemented in two stages stage one is concerned with the spanning of isoquants and stage two with an evaluation of the position of an observed input output combination compared to the isoquants both stages involve linear programming techniques solely

static efficiency decompositions and capacity utilisation integrating economic and technical capacity notions starting from existing static decompositions of overall economic efficiency on nonparametric production and cost frontiers this article proposes more comprehensive decompositions including several cost based notions of capacity utilization furthermore in case prices are lacking we develop additional decompositions of overall technical efficiency integrating a technical concept of capacity utilization these new efficiency decompositions provide a link between short and long run economic analysis and in empirical work avoid conflating inefficiency and differences in capacity utilization an empirical analysis using a monthly panel of chilean hydro electric power plants illustrates the potential of these decomposition proposals

best practice technology in an adverse environment the case of indian sugar 1981 1986 abstract empirical production frontiers are sometimes observed to shift downward over certain periods of time associating higher quantities of input with lower quantities of output this phenomenon is quite different than an increase in observed inefficiency relative to best practice we find such a shift for the indian vacuum pan sugar industry and identify its cause as environmental adversity reducing the performance of best practice technology specifically agro climatic difficulties exacerbated by regulation induced rigidities provide the adverse environment the case serves as a context for a re examination of the concepts of best practice technology and technological regress

the travel cost model for lake recreation a comparison of two methods for incorporating site quality and substitution effects this paper empirically illustrates how different assumptions regarding recreationists decision making behavior affect the predicted changes in recreational activity given a water quality improvement a multinomial logit model which reallocates visits away from other sites to the improved site predicts a smaller outward shift of the recreationist s demand curve than the more traditional travel cost model which does not assume any reallocation of visits among sites

monetary policy and wealth inequality over the great recession in the uk an empirical analysis abstract we use detailed micro information at household level from the wealth and assets survey to construct measures of wealth inequality from 2006 to 2018 at the monthly frequency we investigate the dynamic relationship between monetary policy and the evolution of wealth inequality measures our findings suggest that expansionary monetary policy shocks lead to an increase in wealth inequality and contributed significantly to its fluctuations this effect is heterogenous across the wealth distribution with the monetary shock affecting the median household relative to the 10th and 20th percentile by a larger amount than the right tail our results suggest that the shock is transmitted through changes in net property and financial wealth

short and long run credit constraints in french agriculture a directional distance function framework using expenditure constrained profit functions this empirical application investigates the eventual presence of credit constraints using a panel of french farmers the credit constrained profit maximization model proposed by fare grosskopf and lee is extended in three ways first we rephrase the model in terms of directional distance functions to allow duality with the profit function second we model credit constraints in the short run and investment constraints in the long run using short and long run profit functions third we lag the expenditure constraint one year to account for the separation between planning and production we find empirical evidence of credit and investment constraints financially unconstrained farmers are larger perform better and seem to benefit from a virtuous circle where access to financial markets allows better productive choices

analyzing components of productivity growth using the bennet lowe indicator an application to welsh sheep farms this article introduces the bennet lowe total factor productivity tfp indicator the proposed measure is difference based additively complete and transitive we also develop a general nonparametric framework to exhaustively decompose all bennet type tfp indicators including the one introduced here into technical change technical efficiency change scale efficiency change and mix efficiency change this decomposition provides a powerful tool for policy makers to guide financial decisions on research and development extension subsidies and price support the empirical application focuses on the welsh sheep sector for the years 2001 2014 the results show that in this 14 year period welsh sheep farms increased their tfp by 30 28 on average 2 33 p a however the exhaustive decomposition shows that tfp growth is not distributed equally across all farms with an increasing divergence between front runners and laggards the negative values of scale efficiency change and mix efficiency change cast doubt on the current subsidy policies

what do we know about evolution of top wealth shares in the united states in piketty s 2014 prominent book capital in the twenty first century he argues that the concentration of wealth may become increasingly extreme in the future as piketty reminds us the group of rentiers people living off accumulated capital has been historically large and politically and socially influential because so much of large fortunes end up being inherited the current concentration of wealth is bound to predict at least weakly and perhaps strongly how important rentiers will be regardless of whether one buys into depictions such as the rentier enemy of democracy p 422 the extent to which the well off are going to rely on work versus rely on the returns to their wealth in the future is clearly important for assessing the extent to which a society will view itself as in some way a meritocracy given that the us economy has experienced rising inequality in its income and earning distributions for example piketty and saez 2003 or see the symposium on the top 1 percent in the summer 2013 issue of this journal one would expect that the distribution of wealth would follow a similar path however available evidence on this topic is much more scant and conflicting than that on income and earnings in fact when piketty 2014 reports direct estimates of wealth concentration for france the united kingdom sweden and the united states in chapter 10 of his book he finds as yet little evidence of dramatic increase in wealth concentration in any of these countries

cost effectiveness measures on convex and nonconvex technologies abstract camanho and dyson 2005 extended shephard s 1974 revenue indirect cost efficiency approach to a cost effectiveness framework which helps to assess the ability of a firm to achieve the current revenue expressed in the firm s own prices and quantities at minimum cost the degree of cost effectiveness is quantified as the ratio of the minimum cost to the observed cost of the evaluated firm where the minimum cost is computed by simultaneously adjusting the output levels at the current revenue in this paper we develop two cost effectiveness approaches based on convex data envelopment analysis and nonconvex free disposable hull technologies the objectives of this paper are threefold firstly we develop a convex cost effectiveness cce measure which is equivalent to the camanho dyson cce measure under the constant returns to scale assumption secondly we introduce three nonconvex cost effectiveness ncce measures which are shown to be equivalent with respect to each returns to scale nonconvex technology finally we apply our framework to a real data

congestion and returns to scale in data envelopment analysis congestion indicates an economic state where inputs are overly invested evidence of congestion occurs whenever reducing some inputs can increase outputs return to scale is another related important economic implication of dea efficiencies in this research we discuss together the problems of congestion constant return to scale increasing return to scale and decreasing return to scale by output oriented dea models c2r model bc2 model fg model st model and a modified model we identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the evidence of congestion constant increasing and decreasing returns to scale we show the exclusive relationships between the concepts of congestion and returns to scale numerical examples are provided for illustration

wealth concentration in a developing economy paris and france 1807 1994 using large samples of estate tax returns we construct new series on wealth concentration in paris and france from 1807 to 1994 inequality increased until 1914 because industrial and financial estates grew dramatically then adverse shocks rather than a kuznets type process led to a massive decline in inequality the very high wealth concentration prior to 1914 benefited retired individuals living off capital income rentiers rather than entrepreneurs the very rich were in their seventies and eighties whereas they had been in their fifties a half century earlier and would be so again after world war ii our results shed new light on ongoing debates about wealth inequality and growth

the reliability of estimates of environmental benefits from recreation demand models recreation demand models are commonly employed tools of economists interested in valuing improvements in environmental amenities despite their importance little comparative work has been undertaken to examine the ability of the models to accurately estimate welfare changes a simulation study designed to compare the reliability of estimated welfare measures compensating variation and consumer surplus from several commonly employed recreation demand models is presented results of the study indicate that choice of functional form and model specification are important determinants of the resulting estimates of benefits

a nonparametric approach to expenditure constrained profit maximization a nonparametric approach to expenditure constrained profit maximization is developed a deterministic frontier profit function is constructed with and without expenditure constraints foregone profit is used as dual evidence for the existence of expenditure constraints individual evaluations on performance and expenditure constraints are produced empirical analysis is based on survey data for california rice farms seventeen of the eighty two surveyed farms experience profit loss as a result of expenditure constraints

economies of diversification in the banking industry abstract this paper defines a new measure economies of diversification to examine the cost effect of product line expansion this measure is a special case of expansion path subadditivity and contains economies of scope as a special case a nonparametric frontier technique which isolates the effects of inefficiency and scale is used to measure economies of diversification applied to a set of 468 u s depository institutions operating in 1984 we find slight diseconomies of diversification diseconomies of diversification and inefficiency due to the overutilization of resources are found to be more important determinants of bank costs than is the failure to operate at optimal scale

construction of all dea efficient surfaces of the production possibility set under the generalized data envelopment analysis model abstract in this paper we study the structural properties of dea efficient surfaces of the production possibility set under the generalized data envelopment analysis gdea model introduced by yu wei and brockett 1996 the gdea model contains the following well known data envelopment analysis dea models as its special cases the ccr model by charnes cooper and rhodes 1978 the bcc model by banker charnes and cooper 1984 the fg model by fare and grosskopf 1985 and the st model by seiford and thrall 1990 the relationships among decision making units dmus can be found by solving the gdea model with predilection cone description using these relations to identify relative positions of the dmus on the dea efficient surface we devise an efficient algorithm for constructing all the dea efficient surfaces through further analysis we show properties of dea efficient surfaces under several important subclasses of dea models analytical expressions for the dea efficient surfaces are obtained which are useful in analyzing the structure of dea efficiencies and in strategic group classifications results from this paper suggest important applications in constructing pareto solutions or nondominated solutions and in analyzing structural properties of pareto solutions in multiobjective programming

on the share of inheritance in aggregate wealth europe and the usa 1900 2010 this paper provides historical series on the evolution of the share of inherited wealth in aggregate private wealth in europe france the uk germany sweden and the usa over the 1900 2010 period until 1910 the inheritance share was very high in europe 70 80 it then fell abruptly following the 1914 45 shocks down to about 30 40 during the 1950 80 period and is back to 50 60 and rising since around 2010 the us pattern also appears to be u shaped albeit less marked and with significant uncertainty regarding recent trends due to data limitations we discuss possible interpretations for these long run patterns

risk credit constraints and financial efficiency in peruvian agriculture abstract based on a panel data set we use a two stage analysis to evaluate the effects of access to formal credit on financial efficiency of farms in northern peru the first stage uses non parametric data envelope analysis to estimate farm specific measures of financial efficiency 28 per cent of farmers are financially inefficient and credit constraints reduce profits of these farmers by an average of between 17 and 27 per cent the second stage uses tobit regression to evaluate the determinants of financial inefficiency the results point to uninsured risk as a key determinant of financial inefficiency and suggest that policies to strengthen agricultural insurance markets would likely pay large dividends in rural peru

women wealth and mobility using estate tax returns data we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy in the united states peaked in the late 1960s at nearly one half and then declined to one third we argue that this pattern reflects changes in the importance of dynastic wealth with the share of women proxying for inher ited wealth if so wealth mobility decreased until the 1970s and rose thereafter such an interpretation is consistent with technological change driving long term trends in mobility and inequality as well as the recent divergence between top wealth and top income shares documented elsewhere jel d31 j16 j62 033 the extent of and changes in intergenerational mobility of wealth are central to understanding dynamics of wealth inequality but are hard to measure in this paper we argue that the share of women among the wealthiest americans can be used as a proxy for the importance of inherited rela tive to self made wealth this approach assumes that women tend to inherit rather than make great fortunes if so a higher share of women among the wealthy would reflect a rise in inherited wealth at the top and thus lower wealth mobility conversely higher wealth mobility where self made wealth replaces inherited wealth would result in more men at the top of the wealth distribution judged by this proxy and corroborated by various data sources wealth mobility decreased in the period 1925 1969 and increased thereafter such a pattern is consistent with an important role for technological change in shaping the wealth distribution and can provide an explanation for why wealth concentra tion has remained stable despite increasing income concentration in the last three decades over the past century the share of women among the very wealthy followed an inverse u pattern peaking in the late 1960s according to estate tax returns in 1925 one quarter of the wealthiest 0 01 percent were women this fraction rose rapidly through world war ii wwii and then more slowly to peak in 1969 when women neared parity with men since then the decline has been marked by 2000 women s share had fallen to one third its prewar level while the rise was evident among all wealth groups in the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution the decline was confined to the very top figure ia graphs the share of women for four different groups in the top 1 percent among decedents by year figure ib does the same for the living population with the help of estate multipliers a method that treats death as a random sampling device and uses mortality rates by age and gender to infer the distribution of wealth among the living as described in the data appendix while the rise in the share of women among the wealthy until the 1960s could reflect improve ments in women s economic status labor market gains work against the recent decline for instance since the 1970s the share of women among top earners top 0 1 percent has risen by

municipal solid waste recycling market and the european 2020 horizon strategy a regional efficiency analysis in spain abstract this paper focuses on the analysis of the efficiency of spanish regions in the development of the recycling market in their respective territories through the use of a novel data envelopment analysis method with multiple outputs the efficiency analysis takes into account the mandatory goals of reducing mixed collected municipal solid waste and the augmentation of selective collection of recyclable materials as set by the european union and the spanish legal framework this issue is highly relevant since neither of these two management goals may be achieved without the recycling market and its associated industry having been previously developed to a sufficient level results confirm that catalonia navarre and madrid function as benchmark regions to be emulated by the remaining inefficient regions the necessary regional investments and output projections to reach an efficient development of the recycling sector are also estimated additionally it is found that per capita income and population density significantly explain differences in regional efficiencies finally taking efficient regions as benchmarks to learn from some policy recommendations are offered

slack adjusted dea for time series analysis performance measurement of japanese electric power generation industry in 1984 1993 abstract using a new slack adjusted data envelopment analysis sa dea model which explicitly incorporates an influence of slacks into its efficiency measurement this study discusses a use of various efficiencies and index measures for dea dynamic analysis an analytical formulation to determine the type of return to scale rts is proposed for the new dea model this paper mathematically discusses when multiple solutions occur on rts and how to deal with such a difficulty as an important case study this paper applies the proposed dea approach to examine the performance of japanese electric power generation companies from 1984 to 1993 two policy implications are suggested for guiding the japanese electric power industry

a welfare estimation of beach recreation with aggregate data a single site travel cost recreation demand model for a representative agent visiting a beach is employed that uses an indirect utility function alternative specifications of the expected demand function are estimated with aggregate time series data from a local beach park the estimated parameters are used to compute the value of the consumer surplus the recreational value of the park is expectedly sensitive to the functional form used also own price and income elasticities for various functional forms vary the results from the box cox procedure suggest that the semi log function is the most appropriate for the data used in this study confidence intervals are calculated to deal with the reliability problem of the consumer surplus estimates an alternative algorithm which assumes omitted variable as the source of the error in the demand function is also presented

downsizing in the german chemical manufacturing industry during the 1990s why is small beautiful the german chemical manufacturing industry experienced major downsizing between 1992 and 2004 with the average size of firms shrinking by nearly half during this period this study uses modern frontier efficiency analysis to investigate the determinants of this downsizing based on reliable census data the results of this analysis suggest that firms were not primarily concerned with improving technical efficiency but with establishing an optimal scale of production the proportion of scale efficient firms has been persistently increasing and downsizing is found to be a rational conduct because all scale inefficient firms have continually operated under the decreasing returns portion of technology

returns to scale in convex production technologies the notion of returns to scale rts is well established in data envelopment analysis dea in the variable returns to scale production technology the rts characterization is closely related to other scale characteristics such as the scale elasticity most productive scale size mpss and global rts types indicative of the direction to mpss in recent years a number of alternative production technologies have been developed in the dea literature most of these technologies are polyhedral and hence are closed and convex sets examples include technologies with weakly disposable undesirable outputs models with weight restrictions and production trade offs technologies that include several component production processes and network dea models for most of these technologies the relationship between rts and other scale characteristics has remained unexplored the theoretical results obtained in this paper establish such relationships for a very large class of closed convex technologies of which polyhedral technologies are an important example

valuing a fishing day an application of a systematic varying parameter model deciding how to allocate forage among animals is a fundamentally important process in range management the wisdom of these decisions can be enhanced by estimating the marginal value of forage needed by competing species we present a method for

the relation of farm size and government programme benefits an application of data envelopment analysis to policy evaluation data envelopment analysis is used to establish comparisions of maximum profit without and with participation in government progarammes a measure of a farm s ability to survive returns on equity is used to measure the benefit received from participation in government programmes density functions are estimated with kernel density estimation using bootstrap samples and weighted regressions are used to test density estimation using bootstrap samples and weighted regressions are used to test the equality of mean benefits between different size groups the results indicate that almost all farms that could be considered of commercial size receive the same benefit from participation in government programmes

small is not that beautiful after all measuring the scale efficiency of tunisian high schools using a dea bootstrap method allocation of resources to schools in a centrally managed state system as the tunisian one should depend on the performance of the individual institutions the optimal size is of crucial importance in this context and we need accurate measurement for sound policies this article discusses and implements a nonparametric statistical test procedure for organization scale efficiency this procedure allows us to test whether the observed scale efficiency is optimal or not using a smooth bootstrap methodology for efficiency measures estimated using data envelopment analysis dea methods because school principals do not control for the size of their institution i e the capital available at decision time the scale efficiency measures are defined so as to include quasi fixed inputs the results show that scale efficiency measures are subject to sampling variation we also found that the schools that are scale efficient are usually mid sized and large schools when size is measured by the number of students

a variable returns to scale data envelopment analysis model for the joint determination of efficiencies with an example of the uk health service a multi activity dea model for the joint determination of efficiencies with variable returns to scale is developed in this paper the model contains an element of complexity that is not present in the previous dea models for estimating returns to scale it is found that apparent overall efficiency may hide scale inefficiency in individual activities the model is applied to study the performance of individual specialties of national health services trusts in the uk it is argued that efficiency can be defined from two different perspectives either as the most efficient internal allocation of resources or the most efficient overall allocation of resources this distinction becomes important when looking at the efficiency of parts of inefficient dmus the relationship between size and returns to scale is also explored this method allows the determination of optimal size of an activity

dea models for resource reallocation and production input output estimation abstract this paper discusses the inverse data envelopment analysis dea problem with preference cone constraints an inverse dea model can be used for a decision making unit dmu to estimate its input output levels when some or all of its input output entities are revised given its current dea efficiency level the extension of introducing additional preference cones to the previously developed inverse dea model allows the decision makers to incorporate their preferences or important policies over inputs outputs into the production analysis and resource allocation process we provide the properties of the inverse dea problem through a discussion of its related multi objective and weighted sum single objective programming problems numerical examples are presented to illustrate the application procedure of our extended inverse dea model in particular we demonstrate how to apply the model to the case of a local home electrical appliance group company for its resource reallocation decisions

how wrong can you be implications of incorrect utility function specification for welfare measurement in choice experiments despite the vital role of the utility function in welfare measurement the implications of working with incorrect utility specifications have been largely neglected in the choice experiments literature this paper addresses the importance of specification with a special emphasis on the effects of mistaken assumptions about the marginal utility of income monte carlo experiments were conducted using different functional forms of utility to generate simulated choices multi nomial logit and mixed logit models were then estimated on these choices under correct and incorrect assumptions about the true underlying utility function estimated willingness to pay measures from these choice modeling results are then compared with the equivalent measures directly calculated from the true utility specifications results show that for the parameter values and functional forms considered a continuous quadratic or a discrete linear attribute specification is a good option regardless of the true effects the attribute has on utility we also find that mistaken assumptions about preferences over costs magnify attribute mis specification effects

semiparametric econometrics a survey summary semiparametric econometric models contain both parametric and nonparametric components reflecting in some fashion what has been learned from economic theory and previous empirical experience and what remains unknown they raise such questions as how well the parametric component can be estimated and how to construct rules of inference with good statistical properties the paper attempts to survey the econometric and most relevant statistical literature on semiparametric inference and includes a partial bibliography

wealth inequality in the united states since 1913 evidence from capitalized income tax data this paper combines income tax returns with flow of funds data to estimate the distribution of household wealth in the united states since 1913 we estimate wealth by capitalizing the incomes reported by individual taxpayers accounting for assets that do not generate taxable income we successfully test our capitalization method in three micro datasets where we can observe both income and wealth the survey of consumer finance linked estate and income tax returns and foundations tax records wealth concentration has followed a u shaped evolution over the last 100 years it was high in the beginning of the twentieth century fell from 1929 to 1978 and has continuously increased since then the rise of wealth inequality is almost entirely due to the rise of the top 0 1 wealth share from 7 in 1979 to 22 in 2012 a level almost as high as in 1929 the bottom 90 wealth share rst increased up to the mid 1980s and then steadily declined the increase in wealth concentration is due to the surge of top incomes combined with an increase in saving rate inequality top wealth holders are younger today than in the 1960s and earn a higher fraction of total labor income in the economy we explain how our ndings can be reconciled with survey of consumer finances and estate tax data

credit market imperfections and the distribution of policy rents this article shows that credit market imperfections have important implications for the distribution of policy rents in a model with land as fixed factor and credit market imperfections when an area payment is given land rents go up by more than the subsidy on aggregate farms may lose from the subsidy the results depend on the extent to which subsidies have direct and indirect effects on the credit constraints on whether farms rent or own land and on farm heterogeneity

top wealth shares in the uk over more than a century abstract recent research highlighted controversy about the evolution of concentration of personal wealth in this paper we provide new evidence about the long run evolution of top wealth shares for the united kingdom the new series covers a long period from 1895 to the present and has a different point of departure from the previous literature we start with the analysis of the distribution of estates left at death we find that the application to the estate data of mortality multipliers to yield estimates of wealth among the living does not substantially change the degree of concentration over much of the period both in the uk and us allowing inferences to be made for years when this method cannot be applied the results show that wealth concentration in the uk remained relatively constant during the first wave of globalization but then decreased dramatically in the period from 1914 to 1979 the uk went from being more unequal in terms of wealth than the us to being less unequal however the decline in uk wealth concentration came to an end around 1980 and since then there is evidence of an increase in top shares notably in the distribution of wealth excluding housing in recent years we investigate the triangulating evidence provided by data on capital income concentration and on reported super fortunes

capturing the least costly way of reducing pollution a shadow price approach abstract the production analysis literature is increasingly concerned with estimating marginal abatement costs yet most studies do not emphasize the ways in which pollutants may be reduced and their costs which makes them unable to identify the least costly compliance strategy this paper utilizes the materials balance principle to relate pollution to the employment of material inputs a production model which allows input and output substitution downscaling of operations pollution control and emission permits purchases as compliance strategies is proposed and the implications of joint and non joint pollution controls for the trade off between pollutants and desirable outputs are considered marginal abatement costs reflecting the least costly way of compliance are derived by exploiting the duality between the directional distance function and the profit function