Current literature on public hospital efficiency in Australia only reveals information on how efficient public hospitals are in the short run. The presence of persistent technical inefficiency arising from long-term systemic problems and government-related regulatory constraints does not appear...

In this paper we investigate economies of scale and scope of European universities.The proposed approach builds on the notion that university production is a multi-input multi-output process different than standard production activity. The analyses are based on an interesting database which...

We examine the impact of R&D and technology imports on firm performance in Taiwan’s manufacturing industry in a policy context of industrial upgrading. To do so, we estimate a Translog production function on two panels (covering 1992-1995 and 1997-2003), using stochastic frontier models. We...

The wealth of a country is assumed to have a strong non-linear influence on the life expectancy of its inhabitants. We follow up on research by Preston and study the relationship with gross domestic product. Smooth curves for the average but also for (upper) frontiers are constructed by a...

The empirical literature on production and cost functions is divided into two strands: 1) the neoclassical approach that concentrates on model parameters, 2) the frontier approach that decomposes the disturbance term to a symmetric noise term and a positively skewed inefficiency term. We propose...

In the health economics literature there is an ongoing debate over approaches used to estimate the efficiency of health systems at various levels, from the level of the individual hospital- or nursing home –up to that of the health system as a whole. The two most widely used approaches to...