When analyzing productivity and efficiency of firms, stochastic frontier models are very attractive because they allow, as in typical regression models, to introduce some noise in the Data Generating Process. Most of the approaches so far have been using very restrictive fully parametric...

Summary This study explores the patterns of technological capabilities for a sample of 42 countries over the period 1995-2007, introducing a novel methodological approach. We exploit duality between Data Envelopment Analysis and composite indicators to address the inconsistency between the two...

A primal index of productivity change is introduced which decomposes exactly in three components: technical change, technical efficiency change and average scale economies (radial scale change). The proposed index is invariant to movement along indifference surfaces and it collapses to the...

In this paper it is shown that a well known procedure (GEKS) of transitivizing a bilateral system of productivity comparisons is implicitly a way of imposing a homothetic structure onto the data. The main implication of this result is that deviations between the bilateral and the multilateral...