Most empirical work in economic growth assumes either a Cobb-Douglas production function expressed in logs or a log-approximated constant elasticity of substitution specification. Estimates from each are likely biased due to logging the model and the latter can also suffer from approximation...

In this paper we compare two flexible estimators of technical efficiency in a cross-sectional setting: the nonparametric kernel SFA estimator of Fan, Li and Weersink (1996) to the nonparametric bias corrected DEA estimator of Kneip, Simar andWilson (2008). We assess the finite sample performance...

Monotonicity of the equilibrium bidding strategy is a key property of structural auction models. Traditional nonparametric estimators provide a flexible means of uncovering salient features of auction data, but do not formally impose the monotonicity assumption that is inherent in the models...

Recent research on macroeconomic growth has been focused on resolving several key issues, two of which, specification uncertainty of the growth process and variable uncertainty, have received much attention in the recent literature. The standard procedure has been to assume a linear growth...

This paper presents a method to test for multimodality of an estimated kernel density of parameter estimates from a local-linear least-squares regression derivative. The procedure is laid out in seven simple steps and a suggestion for implementation is proposed. A Monte Carlo exercise is used to...

Monotonicity of the equilibrium bidding strategy is a key property of structural auction models. Traditional nonparametric estimators provide a flexible means of uncovering salient features of auction data, but do not formally impose the monotonicity assumption that is inherent in the models...

Symmetric noise is the prevailing assumption in production analysis, but it is often violated in practice. Not only does asymmetric noise cause least-squares models to be inefficient, it can hide important features of the data which may be useful to the firm/policymaker. Here we outline how to...

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...

This paper formally proves that if inefficiency ($u$) is modelled through the variance of $u$ which is a function of $z$ then marginal effects of $z$ on technical inefficiency ($TI$) and technical efficiency ($TE$) have opposite signs. This is true in the typical setup with normally distributed...