Economic policy interventions of a scale as effected in eastern Germany can be expected to have a significant impact on the economy, which may be in accordance with the objectives of the policy measures or manifest itself in distortions of several kinds. This paper analyzes the structural...

We use a translog cost function to model production in the Irish manufacturing sector over the period from 1991 to 2009. We estimate both own- and cross-price elasticities and Morishima elasticities of substitution between capital, labour, materials and energy. We find that capital and energy...

Ghanaian manufacturing firms face a highly risky environment. Firms may attempt to manage these risks by undertaking production, input, and investment strategies designed to lower profit variability. Mean-variance analysis implies, however, that these strategies involve a trade-off with lower...

This article develops a new method of estimating inefficiencies in joint production and shows that unlike the approaches utilized in the previous studies of inefficiency, this method maintains a consistent relationship between the error term of a profit function and the error terms of its price...

The study examined the Relative Efficiency of Small and Medium Scale Agribusiness Enterprises in Imo state, Nigeria using the stochastic translog profit function approach. A multi-stage and simple random sampling technique were used in selecting four hundred eighty enterprises (240 each from...

This article appraises the impressions of technical and price or allocative inefficiency on elasticity of the supply of wheat and demand of its inputs in 27 provinces of Iran. To this purpose, first the technical, price and economic efficiency has been calculated utilizing the stochastic...

The paper uses recent developments of the methodology of efficiency frontiers to provide an original modeling of the risk of volatility of banking profits which relies on the estimation of a profit frontier. This methodology allows taking into account coordinated adjustments of banks’ costs to...

This paper investigates the cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals and their variation with ownership type. It is motivated by the empirical finding that private (for-profit) hospitals – having been shown to be less cost efficient in the past – on average earn higher profits than...

In this paper we reconsider the formal estimation of the risk of financial intermediaries. Risk is modeled as the variability of the profit function of a representative intermediary, here bank, as formally considered in finance theory. In turn, banking theory suggests that risk is determined...

Typically, firms change their size through a row of discrete leaps over time. A very basic model allowing for discontinuous growth can be based on a couple of assumptions: (a) in the short run, the firm’s equipment and organization provide the maximum profit only for a given production level,...