Permutation techniques, where one recompute the test statistic over permutations of data, have a long history in statistics and have become increasingly useful as the availability of computational power has increased. Until now, no permutation tests for examining returns to scale assumptions,...

This chapter investigates the relationship between interbank funds and efficiencies for the commercial banks operating in Turkey between 2001 and 2006. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is executed to find the efficiency scores of the banks for each year, and fixed effects panel data regression is...

This paper proposes nonparametric estimates for the two information measures extropy and entropy when a progressively Type-I interval censored data is available. Different nonparametric approaches are used for deriving the estimates, including: moments of the empirical cumulative distribution...

The explanation of productivity differentials is very important to identify the economic conditions that create inefficiency and to improve managerial performance. In literature two main approaches have been developed: one-stage approaches and two-stage approaches. Daraio and Simar (2003)...

In productivity analysis an important issue is to detect how external (environmental) factors, exogenous to the production process and not under the control of the producer, might influence the production process and the resulting efficiency of the firms. Most of the traditional approaches...

This paper reviews recent developments in nonparametric identi.cation of mea- surement error models and their applications in applied microeconomics, in particular, in empirical industrial organization and labor economics. Measurement error models describe mappings from a latent distribution to...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...