This paper examines how human capital-based approaches explain the distribution of earnings. It assesses traditional, quasi-experimental, and new micro-based structural models, the latter of which gets at population heterogeneity by estimating individual-specific earnings function parameters....

This chapter defines the concepts of this Handbook - performance, productivity, efficiency, and profitability - and discusses the interrelations. The most prominent performance measure, total factor productivity growth, is grounded in activity analysis and related to Debreu's coefficient of...

This chapter reviews various technological indicators from innovation inputs to innovation outputs, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses and the consequent caution that is in order when using these data for economic analysis. It briefly explains the theoretical link between innovation and...

Data envelopment analysis was introduced as a nonparametric linear programming estimator to estimate the production frontier and technical efficiency of observed production units. Allowing multiple inputs and multiple outputs, the approach can be considered a nonparametric quantile regression...

This chapter offers an overview of Data Envelopment Analysis as a nonparametric method of measuring efficiency in production. Special attention is devoted to alternative returns to scale assumptions about the technology and identifying the local nature of returns to scale at projections of an...

Within the field of data envelopment analysis is a sub-group of papers in which many researchers have sought to improve the differential capabilities of DEA and to fully rank both efficient, as well as inefficient, decision-making units. We have divided the ranking concepts into seven general...

This chapter is a survey of developments in stochastic frontier modelling. The literature on stochastic frontiers has grown substantially in the 42 years since the seminal work by Aigner et al. (J. Econom 6 (1): 21–37, 1977). There exist many surveys of this literature that cover a broad range...

This chapter revises the literature on discrete output stochastic frontier models. We suggest an encompassing framework within which to develop new models of production frontier when the output variable is discrete-valued. We discuss specific applications of the framework. In particular, the...

A rich literature on the analysis of efficiency in production has developed since pioneering work of Tjalling Koopmans and George Debreu in the 1950s. This literature includes work by researchers in economics, econometrics, management science, operations research, mathematical statistics and...

The distinguishing feature of the Bayesian approach in performance evaluation is that parameter uncertainty of the various models is formally taken into account along with model uncertainty as well. The usual sampling-theory approach proceeds conditionally on the parameter estimates that have...