This paper measures energy efficiency improvements of US single-family homes between 1997 and 2001 using a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, an indicator of energy efficiency is derived by means of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA),and the analogy between theDEAestimator and traditional...

The relationship between foreign aid and economic growth has been the subject of much controversy. A recent theme suggesting that aid promotes growth, but only in a good policy environment has ratcheted up that debate. In this paper, we assess the importance of policy and aid in generating...

Is public expenditure productive? Is there a shortfall or excess in public capital investment? We address these old issues in the light of new econometric tools. It is argued that the Cobb-Douglas specification that ignores nonlinearity inherent in the functional relationship of the production...

En este artículo se realiza una revisión genérica de los fundamentos básicos de alguno de los métodos más extendidos para analizar la eficiencia, puesto que ésta aparece como elemento determinante,por ser el más controlable, de la competitividad. Por ello, el trabajo arranca...

Accurate credit-granting decisions are crucial to the efficiency of the decentralized capital allocation mechanisms in modern market economies. Credit bureaus and many .nancial institutions have developed and used credit-scoring models to standardize and automate, to the extent possible, credit...

Lenders use rating and scoring models to rank credit applicants on their expected performance. The models and approaches are numerous. We explore the possibility that estimates generated by models developed with data drawn solely from extended loans are less valuable than they should be because...

A model selection procedure based on a general criterion function, with an example of the Kullback-Leibler Information Criterion (KLIC) using quasi-likelihood functions, is considered for dynamic non-nested models. We propose a robust test which generalizes Lien and Vuong's (1987) test with a...

Theoretical models predict asymmetric information in health insurance markets may generate inefficient outcomes due to adverse selection and moral hazard. However, previous empirical research has found it difficult to disentangle adverse selection from moral hazard in health care. We empirically...

This paper considers causal inference and sample selection bias in non-experimental settings in which: (i) few units in the non-experimental comparison group are comparable to the treatment units, and (ii) selecting a subset of comparison units similar to the treatment units is difficult because...