This paper examined cost efficiency differences between rural hospitals participating in the Critical Access Hospital (CAH) Program and a group of non-converting, prospectively paid rural hospitals using both a two-stage semi-parametric approach as well as stochastic frontier analysis (SFA)....

In the paper, the authors considered estimation of efficiency, which measures the ability of a company to obtain the maximum output from given inputs. The comparison of results obtained by using two approaches: parametric (on the example of the SFA method, Stochastic Frontier Analysis) and...

Taken together, studies that examine how well commodity futures markets perform find that risk premiums are common—and so unbiasedness is not—and markets are not uniformly efficient across commodities or forecast horizons. This large body of research sheds important light on whether and to...

Estimation of the technical efficiency which measures the ability of a company to obtain the maximum output from given inputs or to use the minimum input to achieve given outputs has been considered. Stochastic methods were chosen because of their wide application in research in the whole world....

Faster agricultural development requires understanding whether the inverse land size-yield relationship exists or not. To verify the presence of this relationship, this study decomposes a yield index into separate components attributable to (1) efficiency, (2) soil quality, (3) land size, (4)...

In the Budapest Business School College of Finance and Accountancy 989 students attended the compulsory course unit Statistics I. in the Spring semester of 2011/2012 in full-time courses on bachelor level. During the semester two tests – a midterm and a final test, 50 points each – had to be...

Efficient experimental designs offer the potential to reduce confidence intervals for parameters of interest in choice models, or to reduce required sample sizes. C-efficiency recognizes the salience of willingness to pay estimates rather than utility function parameters. This study reports on a...

This bulletin furnishes farm sector financial ratio estimates developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. These estimates incorporate numerous revisions in estimating procedures and changes in available data. Nationaland State-level estimates of liquidity,...

The tables in this bulletin provide aggregate economic and agricultural growth, performance, production, and trade indicators for the world, 14 geographic regions, the Economic Community, Central Europe, and for 141 countries. These countries account for over 99 percent of the world population,...

Most, if not all, production technologies are stochastic. This article demonstrates how data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods can be adapted to accommodate stochastic elements in a state-contingent setting. Specifically, we show how observations on a random input, not under the control of the...