A finite sample improvement of the fixed effects estimator applied to technical inefficiency

<Para ID="Par1">The fixed effects (‘FE’) estimator of technical inefficiency performs poorly when N (the ’number of firms’) is large and T (the ‘number of time observations’) is small. We propose kernel estimators, which includes the FE estimator as a special case. In terms of criteria based on collective conditional ‘mean square error’, it is demonstrated that some kernel estimators are more efficient than the FE estimators of firm effects and inefficiencies in finite sample settings. Monte Carlo simulations support our theoretical findings, and we use an empirical example to show how FE estimation and kernel estimation lead to very different conclusions about technical inefficiency among Indonesian rice farmers. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015