This article tries to estimate the operating efficiency among 30 years (1989-2018) in the information technology (IT) industry, where technologies are everchanging. The balanced panel data model of Kneip et al. is extended to an unbalanced panel data model for more generic applications. The...

One of the key questions in the study of regulation is whether the costs of regulatory compliance fall homogeneously on all businesses or whether certain firms, for instance small ones, are especially penalized. We quantify firms' compliance costs in terms of their labor spending to adhere to...

This paper characterizes the short- and long-run Cournot equilibrium with heterogeneous firms and stochastic technological change. In our model, firms have different technologies with heterogeneous fixed and variable costs and various degrees of markups. In a framework with homogeneous firms,...

The word "efficiency" has several technical meanings. Some of them are confused with productivity, with economies of scale and with optimization. There are also some lay meanings which are vague enough; they allude to effectiveness, to competence, to adequacy, to doing something well, and to...

In the home-care services industry, caregivers drive to visit patients scattered in a district and deliver various care services at the patient's home. We use a unique data set, with a standard panel structure, recording the hours of service and the exact number of miles traveled by each...

We collect data on the size distribution of all U.S. corporate businesses for 100 years. We document that corporate concentration (e.g., asset share or sales share of the top 1%) has increased persistently over the past century. Rising concentration was stronger in manufacturing and mining...

This paper overviews theoretical and empirical contributions that study political borders from an economic perspective. It reviews theories of the number and size of nations focused on the trade-off between economies of scale in public-good provision and heterogeneity of preferences over public...

The Philippines' Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA) identifies one of the modernization objectives as "to encourage horizontal and vertical integration, consolidation, and expansion of agriculture and fisheries activities, group functions and other services through the...

We show how economies of scale may be distinguished from technical progress and how both may be simultaneously identified in the empirical analysis of aggregate economic growth. Using the meta-production function framework and a cross-section of time-series macroeconomic data on inputs and...

This paper studies the bilateral drivers of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between European banks. Two findings document that banks use M&A as a device to leverage their expertise rather than to diversify. (i) Following the literature on matrimonial matching by using a binary logit model, the...

Using a 2007-2014 panel of Austrian crop farms, we analyze the effect of multiple dimensions of land fragmentation on farms' production efficiency and risk performance. We use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a non-parametric linear programming approach, to estimate efficiencies. Technical...

The Philippine government's long-term vision, AmBisyon Natin 2040, aims for a prosperous, predominantly middle-class society where no one is poor. The Philippine Development Plan 2023- 2028 emphasizes strategies to develop and protect individual and family capabilities by reducing...

This paper delves into geographical agglomeration patterns of economic activities focusing on the connection between these agglomeration tendencies and sectoral patterns of innovative activities. Within a broad evolutionary perspective, we refine upon incumbent statistical models, trying to...