The British Columbia halibut fishery provides a natural experiment of the effects of "privatizing the commons." Using firm-level data from the fishery 2 years before private harvesting rights were introduced, the year they were implemented, and 3 years afterward, a stochastic frontier is...

This article demonstrates the compelling case for using the geometric mean formula for splicing overlapping index number series. The justification for using the geometric mean rests on the fact that it is the only symmetric mean formula that generates a spliced series that is invariant to...

The paper presents the first ex-post analysis of profit and productivity of individual vessels following a vessel or licence buyback in a fishery. Using individual firm-level data for the period1997-2000, the paper analyzes a “natural experiment" of the effects of a 1997 scheme to reduce...

The paper presents the first ex-post analysis of profit and productivity of individual vessels following a vessel or licence buyback in a fishery. Using individual firm-level data for the period 1997-2000, the paper analyzes a "natural experiment" of the effects of a 1997 scheme to reduce...

A range of performance measures are suggested and evaluated in the context of regulated industries with multiple inputs and/or multiple outputs. These measures are intended to induce optimizing behavior, i.e., to induce unit cost minimization or productivity growth maximization. Intertemporal...

This paper looks at the characteristics that explain research productivity in a cross section of academic economists. From a sample of 150 economists, we obtained data on a range of human capital variables, teaching loads and research funding. The results suggest that human capital variables,...

This paper reviews and applies some recently proposed methods for separating total factor productivity (TFP) growth into contributions from technical progress and returns to scale, allowing for imperfectly competitive markets. The methods are applied to New Zealand data, using a recently...

We evaluate New Zealand's macroeconomic performance over the 1967-96 period, which witnessed numerous economic reforms. Using both index-number and econometric techniques, we decompose nominal GDP growth and the output gap into contributions from price level changes, productivity growth and...