This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure,and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a...

A basic assumption in the economic literature is the one of diminishing marginal returns to labour. However, theoretical studies on knowledge and labour specialization assume that an increase in the knowledge investment embodied in the human capital of workers raises the marginal product of...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a...

It has been frequently quoted in the literature that one decisive cause of the productive performance of an economy might be infrastructure investment. This paper provides a dual profit theoretical framework of measuring the effects of infrastructure on economic performance in terms of gains in...

The objective of this paper is to identify the impact of public and private agriculturalresearch on multi-output multi-input profit maximizing decisions of Midwestern farmers. The mainhypothesis is that investments in public and private R&D shift outward the supply curves for cropand livestock...

This empirical application investigates the eventual presence of credit constraints using a panel of French farmers. This is the first European application using a direct modelling approach based upon axiomatic production theory. The credit constrained profit maximisation model proposed by...

Ghanaian manufacturing firms face a highly risky environment. Firms may attempt to manage these risks by undertaking production, input, and investment strategies designed to lower profit variability. Mean-variance analysis implies, however, that these strategies involve a trade-off with lower...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate various reliability measures like availability, reliability, mean time to failure and profit function. Design/methodology/approach The authors present a novel method for availability analysis of an engineering system incorporating waiting time to...