Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a widely used tool to estimate relative efficiencies. However, this methodology encounters issues when between-group comparisons with variable returns of scale (VRS) are of interest. In this specification efficiency scores can be undefined when the projection...

This paper considers railway operations in 23 European countries during 1995-2001, where a series of reform initiatives were launched by the European Commission, and analyses whether these reform initiatives improved the operating efficiency of the railways. Efficiency is measured using...

When benchmarking production units by non-parametric methods like data envelopment analysis (DEA), an assumption has to be made about the returns to scale of the underlying technology. Moreover, it is often also relevant to compare the frontiers across samples of producers. Until now, no exact...

It can be argued that the competitiveness of an industry consists of two main parts: The production conditions and the utilization of these. The production conditions are largely determined by factors exogenous to the firms comprising the industry, including the economic environment, regulatory...