We analyse the impact of business incentives on the technical efficiency of Italian manufacturing firms. Using DEA allows a novel treatment of the omitted-variable and sample-selection bias. Through DEA one carries out direct comparisons between similar observations akin to those carried out in...

It has often been observed in the literature that non-parametric approaches to the estimation of production frontiers are hardly robust in the presence of outliers. This paper proposes a class of robust frontier estimators based upon extreme value theory. The nature of the proposed method is...

In this paper, we analyse the impact of business incentives on the technical efficiency of Italian manufacturing firms. Using DEA allows a novel treatment of the omitted-variable and sample-selection bias. Through DEA one carries out direct comparisons between similar observations akin to those...

In this paper, we estimate indices of technological catch-up, technological change and variations in scale efficiency for a sample of 52 countries through the FDH approach with variable scaling parameters (VP-FDH) proposed in Kerstens and Vanden Eeckaut (1999). We compare the results with those...

To be successful in today’s knowledge economy, communities need to boost not only the skills of local people but also the utilisation and deployment of these skills by employers. By ensuring that skills are utilised effectively, local economies can become more competitive and host better...