Heteroscedasticity and Non-Monotonic Efficiency Effects of a Stochastic Frontier Model

We consider a model that provides flexible parameterizations of the exogenous influences on inefficiency. In particular, we demonstrate the model's unique property of accommodating non-monotonic efficiency effect. With this non-monotonicity, production efficiency no longer increases or decreases monotonically with the exogenous influence; instead, the relationship can shifts within the sample. Our empirical example shows that variables can indeed have non-monotonic effects on efficiency. Furthermore, ignoring non-monotonicity is shown to yield an inferior estimation of the model, which sometimes results in opposite predictions concerning the data. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002