Production capital and technology, fundamental to understanding output and productivity growth, are unobserved except at disaggregated levels and must be estimated prior to being used in empirical analysis. We develop and apply a new estimation method, based on advances in economics, statistics,...

This paper makes three contributions to the literature on the effects of collective bargaining on the performance of German establishments. We include the analysis of firms' efficiency and we model productivity and efficiency simultaneously. Confronted with 25 % observations with missing values,...

This paper illustrates the effects of item-nonresponse in surveys on the results of multivariate statistical analysis when estimation of productivity is the task. To multiply impute the missing data a data augmentation algorithm based on a normal/Wishart model is applied. Data of the German IAB...

In this paper, stochastic production frontier models are estimated with IAB establishment data from waves 2002 and 2003 to find important determinants of productivity and ineffciency. The data suffer from nonresponse in the most important variables (output, capital and labor) leading to the loss...

In January 2009 Germany introduced incentive regulation for the electricity distribution sector based on results obtained from econometric and nonparametric benchmarking analysis. One main problem for the regulator in assigning the relative efficiency scores are unobserved firm-specific factors...

Many recent studies exploring conditional factor demand or factor substitution issues use firm level panel data. A considerable number of establishment panels contains no direct information on the capital input, necessary for production or cost function estimation. Incorrect measurement of...

The paper explores the investment behaviour of German firms in the context of the Qapproach, which plays a dominant role in empirical investment research. The analysis is based on the Deutsche Bundesbank's corporate balance sheet statistics. The panel data set contains some 2,300 German firms'...

In order to assess the productivity effects of information and communication technologies (ICT), regressions based on cross?sectional firm?level data may yield unreliable results for the commonly employed production function framework. In this paper, various estimation biases and econometric...

Der Beitrag schildert die Effekte von Antwortausfällen bei einzelnen Fragen ("item non-response") auf die Ergebnisse von multivariaten statistischen Analysen. Dabei wird das Verfahren der "Data Augmentation" angewendet, um die fehlenden Daten zu ersetzen (Schafer 1997). Anhand von Schätzungen...

The paper presents a new framework to assess firm level heterogeneity and to study the rate and direction of technical change. Building on the analysis of revealed short-run production functions by Hildenbrand (1981), we propose the (normalized) volume of the zonotope composed by vectors-firms...