The study analyzes the efficiency implications of fiscal decentralization using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). It uses LGU health expenditure (in per capita real terms) as input. The output variables of interest include access to safe water and sanitation, health facility-based delivery,...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology is used in this study for a comparison of the dynamic efficiency of European countries over the last decade. Moreover, efficiency analysis is used to determine where resources are distributed efficiently and/or were used efficiently/inefficiently under...

The aim of this paper is to measure the efficiency of insurance companies in Saudi Arabia using data envelopment analysis (DEA), to analyse the effectiveness of underwriting processes primarily inputs and outputs are determined. Moreover, this study aims at comparing the efficiency of Takaful...

Productivity and efficiency are key performance indicators of improved seeds. Efficiency differences explain part of the variation in productivity. Improved seeds may affect efficiency because farmers often do not apply inputs at optimum. Improved seeds therefore not only directly affect...

This paper empirically investigates the difference between Islamic and conventional banks in terms of business dynamics, cost structure, credit quality, and stability. It also examines the difference in the response of two types of banks during peak and trough phases of the business cycle. The...

Innovation, in contemporary times, has been established as the lynchpin of growth and national competitive advantage among countries. Supranational and national resources have jointly combined to create sound innovation strategies and diffusion policies for member states in recent times....

This paper aims to decompose the sources of growth in economies in the Southern African region's Common Monetary Area and in the provinces of South Africa. Decomposition results for the Common Monetary Area reveal that the growth of aggregate and sectoral gross domestic product is driven by...

We develop a model with optimal shares of intergovernmental transfers, and we apply a simulation analysis of our model for the case of Mexico. The main outcomes of this paper are as follows: First, we provide optimal shares of intergovernmental funds to be allocated in each state considering the...

This paper seeks to assess the effectiveness of customs policies in increasing the resources devoted to controlling and inspection. Specifically, it seeks to analyze whether an increase in the administrative cost of collecting taxes on foreign trade in Ecuador contributes to reducing customs...

We study the slot allocation problem where agents have quasi-linear single-peaked preferences over slots and identify the rules satisfying efficiency, strategy-proofness, and individual rationality. Since the quasi-linear single-peaked domain is not connected, the famous characterization of the...

Background: Due to growing expenditures, health systems have been pushed to improve decision-making practices on resource allocation. This study aimed to identify which practices of priority setting and resource allocation (PSRA) have been used in healthcare systems of high-income countries....

The aim of the study is to elaborate an econometric model to determine the conditionsfor ensuring the balanced development of environmental, economic, and social components of theRussian agricultural sector within the Eastern European region. The method of fuzzy sets was usedto build an integral...

Despite the number of studies on the efficiency of container ports, most studies are of developed nations, and very few are of developing nations, such as India. Indian container ports are very critical due to their location advantage and their ability to handle transhipment traffic. There is a...

This paper adds some formal research to the success of ongoing efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic by examining the drivers of the administration and delivery efficiency of coronavirus vaccines. For this purpose, we use data from the 50 US states and place the formal analysis in the context...

Online advertising often involves targeting ads to certain types of consumers where ads are commonly sold by generalized second price auctions. However, such an auction or mechanism could be considered unfair if similar consumers are consistently shown different ads or consistently receive...

Using an estimated demand model, we simulate household-level demand responses to the recent Slovak VAT reform and its hypothetical alternatives. We use simulation results, instead of the standard approximate measures, for constructing an improved efficiency indicator of tax reforms as a ratio of...

We revisit the effects of globalisation over the past 50 years in a large sample of advanced and emerging countries. We use accessions to \Globalisation Clubs" (WTO, OECD, EU), financial liberalisation and an instrument for trade openness to study the trade-off between efficiency (proxied by...

There is a growing body of evidence that interest rate spreads in Africa are higher for big ba nks compared to small banks. One concern is that big banks might be using their market power to charge higher lending rates as they become larger, more efficient, and unchallenged. In contra st,...

We study chip-strategy equilibria in two-player repeated games. Intuitively, in these equilibria players exchange favors by taking individually suboptimal actions if these actions create a "gain" for the opponent larger than the player's "loss" from taking them. In exchange, the player who...

We study the mechanism of action of an early-life social safety net program, and quantify its impact on child health outcomes at birth. We consider both the equity and efficiency implications of program impacts, and provide a metric to compare various such programs around the world. In...

An ongoing debate in the literature on efficiency of higher education institutions concerns the indicator for research output in the empirical analysis. While several studies chose to use the number of publications, others rely on the overall amount of research grants. The present study...

When analyzing what determines the efficiency of production, regressing efficiency scores estimated by DEA on explanatory variables has much intuitive appeal. Simar and Wilson (2007) show that this nai͏̈ve two-stage estimation procedure suffers from severe flaws, that render its results, and...

Measuring the efficiency of a national park is difficult due to, among other factors, the heterogeneity of resources supplied (e.g., budget, staffs) and outcomes expected (e.g., income, visitors’ flow). While this is an issue in protected area management, it has been approached successfully in...

This paper investigates the efficiency of the public sector in a sense of public performance and expenditures. For 23 European countries and for the period between 1995 and 2015 we construct a measure of public sector performance that consist of nine distinct indices for each area of public...

The purpose of this study is to examine the efficiency of the banks in Lithuania by employing the DEA method and evaluate bank performance in a low interest rate environment. The efficiency scores were calculated with a non-parametric frontier input-oriented DEA technique with the variable...

This paper investigates the size-efficiency relation of European cooperative banks during the 2006-2015 period. We employ the Stochastic Frontier Analysis in order to obtain inefficiency estimates and its determinants on the set of 183 cooperative banks from 12 European countries. This work...

We develop a novel technique to decompose banks' ratio of nonperforming loans to total loans into three components: first, a minimum ratio that represents best-practice lending given the volume and composition of a bank's loans, the average contractual interest rate charged on these loans, and...

This paper contributes to the existing literature by examining the efficiency and competitiveness of the Takaful insurance. We employ the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute the efficiency of Takaful operators, while Panzar-Rosse (P-R) H-statistic method is used to evaluate the degree of...

The objective of the paper is to review the use of big data analytics (BDA) in banks and non-banks financial institutions (BNBFI) in Bangladesh. Since the advent of information technology (IT), data collection for BNBFI becomes easy through various channels. As BNBFI conduct business through...

We analyze a setting common in privatizations, public tenders, and takeovers in which the ex post efficient allocation, i.e., the first best, is not implementable. Our first main result is that the open ascending auction is not second best because it is prone to rushes, i.e., all active bidders...