In this paper we analyze the evolution of firm efficiency in the Czech Republic. Using a large panel of more than 190,000 Czech firm/years we study whether firms fully utilize their resources, how firm efficiency evolves over time, and how firm efficiency is determined by ownership structure. We...

This study aims to investigate the cost efficiency of Turkish commercial banks over the restructuring period of the Turkish banking system, which coincides with the 2008 financial global crisis and the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis. To this end, within the stochastic frontier framework, we...

This paper investigates the effects of different health systems on cost efficiency in inpatient health care among the OECD countries. The results indicate that public contract systems are less efficient and that public integrated health systems are more efficient than public reimbursement systems.

Unit specific effects are often used to estimate non-spatial efficiency. We extend such estimators to the case where there is spatial autoregressive dependence and introduce the concept of spillover efficiency. Intuitively, we present an approach to benchmark how successful units are at...

In previous studies, measures of technical inefficiency effects derived from stochastic production frontiers have been estimated from residuals which are sensitive to specification errors. This study corrects for this inaccuracy by extending the doubly heteroscedastic stochastic cost frontier...

Revised from November 2006 and July 2007. We consider fixed-effect estimation of a production function where inputs and outputs vary over time, space, and cross-sectional unit. Variability in the spatial dimension allows for time-varying individual effects, without parametric assumptions on the...

Economic growth involves reallocating resources from traditional to new techniques of production, creating new relationships between particular resources and productivity. The paper analyzes the implications of this process on the estimation of agricultural production functions using a panel of...

This paper applied a stochastic translog production function to examine the underlying causes of technical inefficiency for 28 provinces in the mainland China over the period 1970-2004. We found that inefficiency was present in production and several relevant explanatory variables contributed to...

This study examines the impact of climate on the yields of seven major crops in Taiwan based on pooled panel data for 15 prefectures over the 1977-1996 period. Unit-root tests and maximum likelihood methods involving a panel data model are explored to obtain reliable estimates. The results...

A new spatial decomposition of total factor productivity growth into direct (own) and indirect (spillover) components is set out. We then apply the decomposition in the context of a spatial autoregressive production frontier analysis of 40 European countries over the period 1995–2008.