The National Development Plan in South Africa aims to combat inequality. The Department of Higher Education and Training has identified goals for public universities not only to improve knowledge creation, transmission, and exchange but also equity. This paper analyzes the degree to which...

The National Development Plan in South Africa aims to combat inequality. The Department of Higher Education and Training has identified goals for public universities not only to improve knowledge creation, transmission, and exchange but also equity. This paper analyzes the degree to which...

In this paper we compare two flexible estimators of technical efficiency in a cross-sectional setting: the nonparametric kernel SFA estimator of Fan, Li and Weersink (1996) to the nonparametric bias corrected DEA estimator of Kneip, Simar andWilson (2008). We assess the finite sample performance...

The paper investigates whether the presence and tenure of Private Equity (PE) investmentin European companies improves their performance. Previous studies documentedthe unambiguous merit of a buyout during the 1980s and 1990s for listedfirms in the US and UK markets. This study analyzes such...

The first chapter investigates the factors that explain the level of technical efficiency of a firm. In an empirical analysis, a unique sample of about 35,000 firms in 256 industries from the German Cost Structure Census over the years 1992-2004 is used. The technical efficiency of the firms is...

The traditional approach to measuring allocative efficiency is based on input prices, which are rarely known at the firm level. This paper proposes a new approach to measure allocative efficiency which is based on the output-oriented distance to the frontier in a profit – technical efficiency...

In this paper we used the procedures developed in the Kumar and Russell (2002) growth-accounting study to examine cross-country growth during the 1990's. Using a data set comprising developed, newly industrialized, developing and transitional economies, we decomposed the growth of output per...

This study questions the popular stereotype that women are more risk averse than men in their financial investment decisions. The analysis is based on micro-level data from large-scale surveys of private households in five European countries. In our analysis of investment decisions, we directly...

This study is intended to assess the introduction of increased capitalization requirements for Ukrainian insurance firms. To do so, we employ up-to-date frontier efficiency analysis The analysis suggests that an increase in size occurs not only because of the regulator?s requirements, but also...