Whilst joint ventures offer a potentially attractive form of corporate and industrial organisation, they also experience high rate of break-up within ten years from their initial formation. In this paper, we model this process not as an uncertain random event, but rather as the predictable...

Rather than being a random unpredictable event, the break-up of an equity joint venture after a finite time can be modelled as the predictable consequence of underlying economic parameters under conditions of complete certainty. The paper examines the impact of a range of important economic...

When university Departments are under pressure to improve the assessed quality of their research and teaching in several different directions simultaneously, questions arise as to the nature of the corresponding feasible set and the shape of its frontier. When quality is judged by reference to...

One of the main motivations for productivity analysis is to assess the scope for overall improvements in the output possibilities of individual producers. At times of fiscal and government budgetary pressures, attention focuses particularly on the output potential of public service providers and...

Applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to real-world public policy issues can raise many interesting complications beyond those considered in standard models of DEA. One of these complications arises if the funding levels of public service providers, and their ability to attract and retain...

Improving the educational outcomes which schools achieve in the primary and secondary education sectors has become a central public policy goal, to which large sums of public money have been devoted. Being able to estimate the educational production function between pupil educational...

It has been argued by several commentators (e.g. Wilkinson, Evans) that psycho-social stress associated with an individual’s relative position in the social and economic hierarchy is a predominant determinant of their health status, with an individual’s absolute level of income of lesser...

The BLU properties of OLS estimators under known assumptions have encouraged the widespread use of OLS multivariate regression analysis in many empirical studies that are based upon a conceptual model of a single explanatory equation. However, such a model may well be an imperfect empirical...