This study applies parametric distance functions to estimate the efficiency of foreign banks in Australia, and subsequently employs extreme bounds analysis to establish the determinants of foreign bank efficiency that are robust to model specification. The limited global advantage hypothesis of...

The study contributes to the development of 'standards' for the application of matching algorithms in empirical evaluation studies. The focus is on the first step of the matching procedure, the choice of an appropriate distance function. Supplementary to most former studies, the simulation is...

Describing individual behavior, we will be concerned with an axiom system, which can be interpreted by Shephard's distance function. Based on this function, one can discover the individual's preference relation, from which the individual's demand function can be derived. We will realize that the...

Brazil has one of the most extensive public program for organ transplantation in the world, and the Brazilian National Health System (SUS) provides full coverage procedures related to organ donation, transplants, and post-transplant. Despite the relevance of the subject and the existence of long...

German savings banks play a key role in financing German SMEs. Accordingly, the analysis of their efficiency is of economic importance. We apply data envelopment analysis to explore the influence of the financial crisis (2007 to 2008) as well as the Eurozone crisis (since the end of 2009) on the...

For more than fifty years, the Solow decomposition (Solow 1957) has served as the standard measurement of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in economics and management, yet little is known about its precision, especially when the capital stock is poorly measured. Using synthetic data...

Malmquist total factor productivity (TFP) index has been extensively applied in the literature to measure productivity growth decomposition. This study applies a parametric decomposition of a Generalized Malmquist TFP index to measure and compare the levels and trends in agricultural...

This paper analyzes total factor productivity growth in agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean between 1961 and 2007 employing the Malmquist Index, a non-parametric methodology that uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods. The results show that among developing regions, Latin...

This work decompose labor-productivity grotwh and convergence in EU into components attributable to technological change (shifts in the European production frontier), technological catch-up (movements toward or away from the frontier) and factor accumulation (movement toward or away from the...

The "Excellence Initiative" is a prestigious third-party funding program for German universities, organized as a research contest. We investigate whether universities in this program (or that prepared an application) had different trends in terms of productivity and technical efficiency than...