An evaluation of accounting-based finding costs as efficiency measures for oil and gas exploration

The authors have operationalized firm-specific exploration efficiency as the difference between a firm-specific intercept estimated in a fixed-effects panel data Cobb-Douglas production frontier model and the maximum firm-specific intercept estimated in that model. The production model was estimated during two different time periods, 1982--1985 and 1989--1992, allowing efficiency to vary intertemporally. This efficiency estimate served as a benchmark against which they compared various measures of inverse finding costs. They assumed that the degree of association with an efficiency benchmark is an important attribute of any finding cost measure and that, further, the degree of association may be used as a metric for choosing between alternative finding cost measures. Accordingly, they evaluated the cross-sectional statistical association between estimated efficiency and alternative inverse finding cost measures. They discovered that the inverse finding cost measure that exhibited the strongest association with efficiency during the two time periods was a three-year moving-average finding cost which included exploration plus development expenditures as costs and reserve extensions and additions plus revisions as the units added.