Several years after the reform of the pension scheme in Nigeria, there is still trepidation about the success of the scheme. A particularly knotty issue is the mode of collecting benefits after retirement. It would seem that many retirees prefer programmed withdrawal to annuities without...

Traditional sampling techniques have not yielded desired results when applied to hidden or rare populations. A hidden population of considerable interest in Nigeria is that of students in tertiary institutions engaged in substance abuse because of the stigma surrounding such habits and the high...

This study examined the impact of the financial crisis on the environmental and technical efficiencies of the Japanese manufacturing industry. Overall, we found that while the crisis had a negative impact on technical efficiency it did not affect environmental efficiency- the only exception was...

This paper analyzes productivity with a directional distance function model by investigating convexity and non-convexity in the Chinese banking sector. Two primary findings are summarized. First, there is a distinct change in productivity between large versus small banks and public versus...

This paper analyses technical efficiency of French urban public transport from 1995 to 2002 with unbalanced panel data. The latent class frontier model is used allowing the identification of different segments in the production frontier. We find that there are three statistically significant...