In the majority of production processes, noticeable amounts of bad byproducts or bad outputs are produced. The negative effects of the bad outputs on efficiency cannot be handled by the standard Malmquist index to measure productivity change over time. Toward this end, the Malmquist–Luenberger...

The microfinance sector has room for pure for-profit microfinance institutions (MFIs), non-profit organizations, and “social” for-profit firms that aim to pursue a double bottom line. Depending on their business model, these institutions target different types of borrowers, change the size...

This paper investigates the process of banking integration in the EU15 countries and the Eurozone by testing for convergence in bank efficiency among commercial banks. We use a two-step approach: First we estimate efficiency by applying an innovative methodological approach that treats banks’...

This paper extends recently developed parametric hyperbolic distance functions to the analysis of energy and environmental efficiency for a panel data of 29 provinces in China from 1995–2010, and then decomposes the growth of environmental total factor productivity into two component measures,...