This paper presents new estimates of scale economies for US hospitals. We show that the common translog specification of hospital costs is a misspecification, and employ nonparametric, local linear estimation with both continuous and discrete covariates. A bootstrap method is used to provide...

A recent article (Tse, 1998) published in this journal analysed the conditional heteroscedasticity of the yen-dollar exchange rate based on the fractionally integrated asymmetric power ARCH model. In this paper, we present replication results using Tse's (1998) yen-dollar series. We also examine...

According to the life-cycle model, mortality risk will influence both retirement and the desire to annuitize wealth. We estimate the effect of subjective survival probabilities on retirement and on the claiming of Social Security benefits because delayed claiming is equivalent to the purchase of...

Productivity of blast furnaces in India is studied by disaggregating the production process and the utilization process. A dimension-reducing nonparametric approach-projection pursuit regression-is used. We find that productivity can be increased significantly by improving the quality of coal....

This paper explores a relatively new methodology, the directional distance function method, to analyse productivity growth. The method allows us to explicitly evaluate the role that undesirable outputs of the economy, such as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, have on the frontier...

Stochastic Dominance techniques are adapted and employed to study the extent and progress of Polarization, Welfare and Poverty of 101 nations over the period 1970-1995. The adaptations provide methods of comparing mass relocation by evaluating various degrees of right and left separation between...