Cost efficiency of banks in 20 former socialist emerging economies is analyzed using a novel methodology - a latent class stochastic efficiency frontier model - that explicitly accounts for unobserved differences in technological regimes due to the heterogeneity of economic environments in which...

This paper examines the impact of regulatory reform on the performance of Spanish savings banks. To this end it uses panel data for the period 1986-1995 and a flexible variable profit function that incorporates time-varying technical efficiency. The focus is whether increased competition brought...

This paper presents a procedure for measuring technical and allocative inefficiency in an input distance function framework. The procedure involves solving a system of equations to compute the unobserved cost minimizing input vector that is used to compute the cost of allocative inefficiency....

This paper addresses estimation and decomposition of productivity change, which is mostly identified as technical change under constant (unitary) returns to scale (CRS). If the CRS assumption is not made, productivity change is decomposed into technical change and scale effects.Furthermore, if...

This paper deals with modeling firm-specific technical change (TC), and technological biases (inputs and scale) in estimating total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Several dual parametric econometric models are used for this purpose. We examine robustness of TFP growth and TC among competing...

Modelling and testing whether competitive pressures driven by deregulatory changes make markets more competitive are examined. Departures from competitive markets are modelled via mark-up prices. Empirically, a panel data is used on Spanish savings banking industry that is undergoing...

A previous paper by Arnold, Bardhan, Cooper and Kumbhakar (1996) introduced a very simple method to estimate a production frontier by proceeding in two stages as follows: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used in the first stage to identify efficient and inefficient decision-making units...

This paper addresses several important issues related to crime. First, we construct a violent crime index taking into account seven different types of crimes. We use an aggregator function to define a crime index that attaches crime-specific weights which can be interpreted as severity of each...

The paper analyzes labor-use efficiency and employment elasticity in China’s manufacturing sector by applying a stochastic input distance function to the panel data of twenty-eight Chinese manufacturing industries relative to 1999-2008. The outcome is a labor-use efficiency rate ranging from...