This paper analyzes productivity growth in seventeen OECD countries over the period 1979-88. A nonparametric programming method (activity analysis) is used to compute Malmquist productivity indexes. These are decomposed into two component measures, namely, technical change and efficiency change....

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to show how to measure profit efficiency in banking using a newly developed technique, and to use that technique to determine the effect of risk-based capital requirements on the profit performance of US banks. The measure of profit efficiency used captures...

In this paper, the authors develop measures of plant capacity, plant capacity utilization, and technical change based on observed best practice performance in a given industry. These measures are calculated as solutions to linear programming problems that are closely related to those used to...

In many instances, a firm's observed production choices will not be consistent with profit maximization or cost minimization at market prices. Such firms are generally assumed to minimize cost with respect to shadow prices. The authors extend this shadow cost function approach to allow for the...