One of the main purposes of the frontier literature is to estimate inefficiency. Given this objective, it is unfortunate that the issue of estimating “firm-specific” inefficiency in cross sectional context has not received much attention. To estimate firm-specific (technical) inefficiency,...

Markowitz's mean-variance (MV) efficient portfolio selection is one of the most widely used approaches in solving portfolio diversification problem. However, contrary to the notion of diversification, MV approach often leads to portfolios highly concentrated on a few assets. Also, this method...

It is well known that most of the standard speci¯cation tests are not valid when the alternative hypothesis is misspeci¯ed. This is particularly true in the error component model, when one tests for either random e®ects or serial correlation without taking account of the presence of the other...

This paper studies the connections among quantile regression, the asymmetric Laplace distribution, maximum likelihood and maximum entropy. We show that the maximum likelihood problem is equivalent to the solution of a maximum entropy problem where we impose moment constraints given by the joint...

In this article, I derive expressions for the Morishima elasticities of substitution (MES) for the variable profit function and estimate these elasticities to shed some light on the substitutability between imports, capital services, and labor services. The results reveal that capital services...

We analyze the disinflationary experience between 1979-1993 for two traditionally inflationary countries of the European Monetary System: France and Italy. For each country, a vector autoregressive model is estimated. Shocks in the model combine domestic and foreign sources. The latter capture...