A Recursive Thick Frontier Approach To Estimating Production Efficiency

We introduce a new panel data estimation technique for cost and production functions: the Recursive Thick Frontier Approach (RTFA). RTFA has two advantages over existing thick frontier methods. First, technical inefficiency is allowed to be dependent on the explanatory variables of the frontier model. Secondly, no distributional assumptions are imposed on the inefficiency component of the error term. We show by means of simulation experiments that RTFA can outperform the popular stochastic frontier approach (SFA) and the “within” OLS estimator for realistic parameterisations of the productivity model.