Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier...

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 and Wilson (2008). We assess the finite sample...

The traditional approach to measuring allocative efficiency is based on input prices, which are rarely known at the firm level. This paper proposes a new approach to measure allocative efficiency which is based on the output-oriented distance to the frontier in a profit – technical efficiency...

The process of the East-West integration has come to a point that enlargement appears inevitable. But are these countries really ready to join the EU in tfirms of competitive perfirmance? Firstly, we construct a virtual best practice production frontier for firms active in a European Union...

This paper investigates the performance and efficiency of the public sector in 74 countries worldwide for the years 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2000. Similar to what is done in Afonso / Schuhknecht / Tanzi (2005, Public Choice), I calculate performance measures for various fields of government policy,...

This paper measures energy efficiency improvements of US single-family homes between 1997 and 2001 using a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, an indicator of energy efficiency is derived by means of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and the analogy between the DEA estimator and traditional...

We analyze potential gains from hypothetical mergers in local public transport using the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis with bias corrections by means of bootstrapping. Our sample consists of 41 public transport companies from Germany's most densely populated region, North...

This paper assesses the relative efficiency of knowledge production in the OECD using a nonparametric DEA approach. Resources allocated to R&D are limited and should therefore be used efficiently given the institutional and legal constraints. This paper presents efficiency scores based on an...