This paper analyzes productivity growth in seventeen OECD countries over the period 1979-88. A nonparametric programming method (activity analysis) is used to compute Malmquist productivity indexes. These are decomposed into two component measures, namely, technical change and efficiency change....

The last two decades have witnessed a revival in interest in the measurement of productive efficiency pioneered by (1957) and (1951). 1978 was a watershed year in this revival with the christening of DEA by (1978) and the critique of Farrell technical efficiency in terms of axiomatic production...

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to show how to measure profit efficiency in banking using a newly developed technique, and to use that technique to determine the effect of risk-based capital requirements on the profit performance of US banks. The measure of profit efficiency used captures...

In this paper, the authors develop measures of plant capacity, plant capacity utilization, and technical change based on observed best practice performance in a given industry. These measures are calculated as solutions to linear programming problems that are closely related to those used to...

The purpose of this paper is to develop models with and without emissions trading and to compare industry profits under the two regimes. The model in which emissions trading is permitted is a nonparametric industry frontier model in the spirit of Fare, Grosskopf and Li (1992). It is relative to...

This paper introduces an intertemporal variable cost indirect technology which permits technological change over time, as well as allowing for intertemporal financial flexibility. It characterizes firms or agencies which maximize outputs or services subject to a budget constraint. We define...