The National Development Plan in South Africa aims to combat inequality. The Department of Higher Education and Training has identified goals for public universities not only to improve knowledge creation, transmission, and exchange but also equity. This paper analyzes the degree to which...

The National Development Plan in South Africa aims to combat inequality. The Department of Higher Education and Training has identified goals for public universities not only to improve knowledge creation, transmission, and exchange but also equity. This paper analyzes the degree to which...

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...

The first chapter investigates the factors that explain the level of technical efficiency of a firm. In an empirical analysis, a unique sample of about 35,000 firms in 256 industries from the German Cost Structure Census over the years 1992-2004 is used. The technical efficiency of the firms is...

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...

This paper evaluates the impact of British Columbia’s carbon tax on manufacturers’ economic and environmental performance in a unified modeling framework that allows for making critical distinctions between efficiency, technical change, and total factor productivity as performance measures....

This paper contributes to the literature on subjective well-being of individuals by estimating a “happiness frontier” under the premise that individuals seek to maximize happiness. The happiness frontier is defined as the pinnacle of happiness, given the resources and personal...

In this paper we use the Kumar and Russell [American Economic Review (2002) Vol. 92, pp. 527–548] growth-accounting procedure to examine cross-country growth during the 1990s. Using a data set comprising developed, newly industrialized, developing and transitional economies, we decompose the...

Die Dissertation besteht aus fünf unabhängigen Aufsätzen zu zwei zentralen Themen. Das erste Thema ist die Beziehung zwischen Infrastruktur und privater Produktivität. Das zweite Thema sind die Determinanten regionaler Infrastrukturinvestitionen. Während der erste und zweite Aufsatz der...

We analyze the regional distribution of different categories of creative individuals in Germany. Generally, the share of creative people is higher in cities as compared to the rural area The freelancing artists are a kind of exception in this respect; they constitute a relatively high share of...