Estimation and decomposition of overall (economic) efficiency into technical and allocative components goes back to Farrell (1957). However, in a cross-sectional framework joint econometric estimation of efficiency components has been mostly confined to restrictive production function models...

This paper analyzes the impact of Research and Development (R&D) on the productivity of China's high technology industry. In order to capture important differences in the effect of R&D on output that arise from geographic and socioeconomic differences across three major regions in China, we use...

In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as afunction of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affecttechnical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely externalnon-economic) as well as other...

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities onfirms’ performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontiertechnique is applied, basing the analysis on a unique unbalanced longitudinal datasetconsisting of 532 top...

This paper analyzes the impact of load factor, facility and generator types on the productivity of Korean electric power plants. In order to capture important differences in the effect of load policy on power output, we use a semiparametric smooth coefficient (SPSC) model that allows us to model...

Cost minimization and profit maximization behavioral assumptions are most widely used in microeconomic theory to analyze firm behavior. However, in practice researchers do not know whether every firm in the sample maximizes profit or minimizes cost. In this paper we address this problem via a...

This paper addresses estimation and decomposition of total factor productivity (TFP) change. Usually TFP change is decomposed into technical change and scale effects. If inefficiency exists, it also contributes to productivity change. Here we decompose productivity change into efficiency change...