Accounting for unobservables in production models:management and inefficiency

This paper explores the role of unobserved managerial ability in production and its relationship with technical efficiency. Previous analyses of managerial ability have been based on strong assumptions about its role in production or on the use of proxies. We avoid these limitations by introducing managerial ability as an unobserved random variable in a translog production function. The resulting empirical model can be estimated as a stochastic production frontier with random coefficients.