This paper's study of Connecticut's education costs can serve as the foundation of an equitable and adequate state education aid formula. To the best of the author's knowledge, it is the first cost function study of Connecticut public K–12 education. The author uses a regression model to...

The purpose of this study is to investigate regional differences in the business characteristics of Japanese agricultural cooperatives (JAs), which have been widely criticized for depending on non-agricultural activities, contradictory to cooperative principles. We construct a panel data set...

In preparation to a potential disaster, cooperation between relief organizations and enterprises is important. Through a suitable framework agreement (FA), relief organizations can reduce a large amount of inventory cost and decrease the social cost (i.e., the sum of deprivation cost and...

We derive a new cost of information in rational inattention problems, the neighborhood-based cost functions, starting from the observation that many settings involve exogenous states with a topological structure. These cost functions are uniformly posterior-separable and capture notions of...

This paper explores (dis-)economies of scale in property value assessment via cooperative agreements among small tax assessing jurisdictions without consolidation. New York State incentivizes small neighboring towns to unify their assessment function while maintaining respective tax authority;...

Using a newly compiled data set, this paper provides insights into the characteristics of the child care industry. First, there is no difference in average quality of the services produced between nonprofit and for-profit centers. This indicates that nonprofit status cannot be taken as a signal...

We propose a simple method for estimating cost functions in the presence of endogenous and unobserved quality. The theory of production, the equilibrium conditions implied by optimizing behavior, and exogenous influences on product demand are used to identify the model. An important advantage of...

Using a newly compiled data set, this paper estimates multi- product translog cost functions for 399 child care centers from California, Colorado, Connecticut, and North Carolina. Quality of child care is controlled by a quality index, which has been shown to be positively related to child...

The main purpose of this paper is to present estimates of production and cost functions obtained from using a time-series, cross-section data set pertaining to Israeli industry, We include a detailed list of heterogeneity controls in the specifications which substantially enhances the...

One of the fundamental facts of the environment hospitals face is uncertainty over demand for their services. This uncertainty leads hospitals to hold excess standby capacity to avoid turning away patients. In this paper we reformulate the theory of cost and production to take account of this...

We use data from a sample of day care centers to estimate the relationships between cost and the quality of the child care service provided, and between revenue and quality. We use a measure of child care quality derived from an instrument designed by developmental psychologists. This measure of...

This paper estimates cost functions for day care centers in Massachusetts. The production technology assumed is the generalized homothetic Cobb-Douglas production function. The cost function dual to this production function is estimated separately for profit-making (P1Os) and not-for-profit...

This paper focuses on how changes in the economic and regulatory environment have affected production costs and product characteristics in the automobile industry. We estimate cost functions characteristics. Then we examine how this cost surface has changed over time and how these changes relate...

Classes in microeconomics typically use cubic cost functions because they can exhibit marginal costs that fall as output increases to some efficient level, and then rise thereafter. Cubic cost functions embody economies of scale, making it easy to illustrate that concept with quadratic average...

Using insights obtained from Newey’s (1994) series estimator and a novel restatement of the q-theory that additively separates the marginal adjustment cost term in the canonical model, I model and estimate the shape of the marginal adjustment cost function. I discuss the issues in...

We study the impact of office and computing machinery (OCM) on the demands for workers with different educational levels. The empirical analysis relies on a system of demand equations that nests the translog, the generalised Leontief and the normalised quadratic specifications. Using panel data...

Any serious empirical study of factor substitutability has to allow the data to display complementarity as well as substitutability. The standard approach reflecting this idea is a translog specification - this is also the approach used by numerous studies analyzing the relative capital-skill...

This paper examines the impact of innovations and wages on the demand for heterogeneous labour. Based on matched data from the IAB-establishment panel survey and the files of the employment statistics register for the year 1995, input shares derived from a generalised Leontief cost function are...

This paper presents several techniques for recovering cost function estimates for electricity generation from a model of optimal bidding behavior in a competitive electricity market. Two techniques are developed based on different models of the price-setting process in a competitive electricity...

This note provides a useful property of the Allen-Uzawa partials for the translog cost function. It also suggests how the main results extend to any functional form with certain properties. The curvature of the Allen-Uzawa matrix is the same as the curvature of the Hessian matrix. Intuitively...

This paper uses matched employee-employer LIAB data to provide panel estimates of the structure of labor demand in Germany, 1993-2002, distinguishing between highly skilled, skilled, and unskilled labor and between the manufacturing and service sectors. Reflecting current preoccupations, our...

In order to simplify the representation of a technological relationship between inputs and outputs, a production unit's technology must typically satisfy some restrictive conditions, some of them being well known in the literature. This paper presents new results for aggregating labour inputs...

Our paper deals with empirical and technical problems to derive (conventional) cost functions in banks and other financial institutions. One main reason is based on the still ongoing discussion on inputs and outputs of financial intermediaries. A second obstacle is due to the fact that most of...

In this paper, a theoretical relationship is obtained to measure the effect that inefficiency has on marginal costs, degree of economies of scale and technical change. It is shown that when the relationship between inefficiency and output level is ignored, the estimation of marginal costs and...

Between the early 1970s and very nearly the present, Indians' per capita calorie consumption declined. This decline, perplexing in the face of rising per capita income when malnutrition is rampant, has been termed India's Calorie Consumption Puzzle. It has been partially attributed to a squeeze...

We propose a new measure of the cost of information structures in rational inattention problems, the "neighborhood-based" cost functions, given that many applications involve states with a topological structure. These cost functions summarize the results of a sequential information sampling...

This paper presents a feedback control rule for the machine start-up adjustment problem when the cost function of the machining process is not symmetric around its target. In particular, the presence of a bias term in the control rule permits the process quality characteristic to converge to a...

Contestants often need to incur an opportunity cost to participate in the competition. In this paper, we accommodate costly entry and study the effort-maximizing prize allocation rule in a contest environment of all-pay auction with incomplete information as in Moldovanu and Sela (2001). As...

This paper studies sequencing situations with non-linear cost functions. We show that the neighbor switching gains are now time-dependent, in contrast to the standard sequencing situations with linear cost functions, which complicate finding an optimal order and stable allocations. We derive...

This paper's study of Connecticut's education costs can serve as the foundation of an equitable and adequate state education aid formula. To the best of the author's knowledge, it is the first cost function study of Connecticut public K-12 education. The author uses a regression model to...

The present study develops an equilibrium displacement model (EDM) to evaluate the impacts of a free trade agreement (FTA) on the profits of individual farmers. The parameters representing the share of profit within revenue and the elasticity of cost with respect to quantity in the cost function...

Regulatory authorities in the European electricity sector use benchmarking techniques to determine the cost-efficient production level for an incentive regulation of distribution system operators (DSOs). With nearly 900 DSOs operating in the German electricity sector, of which 200 subject to...

Potable water supply in Germany is highly fragmented. A consolidation of the industry could, therefore, lead to lower cost of water supply and price savings for the customers. In this paper we estimate a total cost function for potable water supply based on a unique sample of German water...