This paper analyzes productivity growth in seventeen OECD countries over the period 1979-88. A nonparametric programming method (activity analysis) is used to compute Malmquist productivity indexes. These are decomposed into two component measures, namely, technical change and efficiency change....

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to show how to measure profit efficiency in banking using a newly developed technique, and to use that technique to determine the effect of risk-based capital requirements on the profit performance of US banks. The measure of profit efficiency used captures...

In this paper, the authors develop measures of plant capacity, plant capacity utilization, and technical change based on observed best practice performance in a given industry. These measures are calculated as solutions to linear programming problems that are closely related to those used to...

The purpose of this paper is to develop models with and without emissions trading and to compare industry profits under the two regimes. The model in which emissions trading is permitted is a nonparametric industry frontier model in the spirit of Fare, Grosskopf and Li (1992). It is relative to...

This paper introduces an intertemporal variable cost indirect technology which permits technological change over time, as well as allowing for intertemporal financial flexibility. It characterizes firms or agencies which maximize outputs or services subject to a budget constraint. We define...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a frontier model for productivity measurement that explicitly recognizes that some inputs are produced and consumed within the production technology. Here we differ from Koopmans (1951) by assuming that the intermediate inputs may also be final output....