The influence of fleet mix, ownership and LCCs on airports’ technical/environmental efficiency

This paper analyses the efficiency of 33 Italian airports for the period 2005–2008. In addition to conventional outputs, differently from previous contributions, two environmental externalities are considered: noise and local air pollution. We perform a two-stage analysis. First, we implement a directional distance function (DDF) model and get airports’ efficiency scores. Then, we study the factors affecting efficiency using a bootstrapping procedure. We find that the fleet mix significantly affects technical/environmental efficiency. Moreover, we provide evidence that public airports have higher efficiency scores. Last, LCCs have no effect on technical/environmental efficiency.