The introduction of the hospital reimbursement based on diagnosis related groups (DRG) in 2004 has been a conspicuous attempt to increase hospital efficiency in Germany. We analyze possible determinants of hospital performance before and after the DRG introduction. A two-stage semi-parametric...

The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology to incorporate measures of hospital quality in efficiency analysis, applied to Portuguese NHS hospitals, in order to assess whether there is a trade-off between efficiency and quality in Portuguese hospitals. We develop and compare two...

In this paper we deal with the measurement of technical efficiency (or X-efficiency) of institutions whose operations might be significantly affected by macroeconomic, environmental and non-controllable factors. For this purpose we introduce a four-stage DEA methodology based on the approach...

This paper is aimed at exploring how X-efficiency or management quality is associated with one of the most vivid forms of international banking, that is, entering new markets by setting up foreign subsidiaries. The analysis focuses on the supposition that management quality ought to be one of...

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...

This paper shows through the combination of output-orientated data envelopment analysis (DEA) with the calculation of Malmquist indexes that the obvious and persistent differences in growth and levels of per capita income and labour productivity between the German states are less caused by...

In this article an application-oriented approach to analyze the cost of conformance of services, i. e. ‘cost of customer satisfaction’, is presented. Contrary to quality costing methods in manufacturing industries, which are concerned about objective quality standards, services have to...