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...

In this paper we consider estimation of models popular in efficiency and productivity analysis (such as the stochastic frontier model, truncated regression model, etc.) via the local maximum likelihood method, generalizing this method here to allow for not only continuous but also discrete...

This paper generalizes the results of Hausman and Taylor (1981), Schmidt and Sickles (1984), Cornwell, Schmidt and Sickles (1990) and Park and Simar (1992) to the efficient IV estimation of panel models in which the random effects are correlated with a subset of the regressors. The model in...

This paper considers the semiparametric stochastic frontier model with panel data which arises in the problem of measuring technical inefficiency in production processes. We assume a parametric form for the frontier function, which is linear in production inputs. The density of the individual...