Transient and persistent efficiency and spatial spillovers : evidence from the Portuguese wine industry

This paper investigates the presence of spatial spillovers in firms' productive (in)efficiency. For this purpose, a spatial stochastic frontier model is specified and estimated, accounting for spatial dependence and persistent and transient (in)efficiency. This approach is applied to a panel dataset from 2014 to 2019 of Portuguese wineries. Apart from the traditional input and output quantities used in the estimation of a production function, the novelty of this study is the inclusion of information on the firms’ exact location, which allows incorporating the neighboring dependence in the productive efficiency analysis. Empirical findings show that despite the Portuguese wineries' technological positive dependence on spatial closeness for both inputs and outputs, the geographic closeness is not strong enough to provide overall productive efficiency gains.