Using Belgian microdata, we assess the impact, on a hedonic regression, of the distortions arising from the choice of either a specific zoning system or the delineation of the study area. We also evaluate the biases that arise when spatial effects are not accounted for. Given that the dependent...

In this paper we study the short term price behavior of December 2008 future prices for EU emission allowances. We model returns and volatility dynamics of this price showing that a standard ARMA-GARCH framework is not adequate and that the gaussianity assumption is rejected due to the...

This paper presents a global approach for museum assessment. We define a museum as an entity which needs to be evaluated according to three well defined tasks: preservation, research and communication, and outcomes. We propose a methodology based on the determination of efficiency frontiers....

In this paper we use data on five social inclusion indicators (poverty, inequality, unemployment, education and health) to assess the performance of 15 European welfare states (EU15) over a ten-year period from 1995 to 2004. Aggregate measures of performance are obtained using index number...

In this paper, we empirically analyze the evolution of firms’ productivity and how the efficiency changes with variations in the inputs’ origin. Using firm-level information on a sample of Irish firms, we assess the importance of the imported inputs’ quota for a firm’s efficiency, as...

Using data from the Community Innovation Survey for Belgium in two consecutive periods, this paper explores the relationship between firm-level innovation activities and the propensity to start exporting. To measure innovation, we include indicators of both innovative effort (R&D activities) as...

The welfare impact of a merger involves the market power offense and the efficiency defense. Salant et al. (1983) show that mergers among symmetric firms are unprofitable except for monopolization. We characterize the limit to this merger paradox in a simple linear Cournot oligopoly with...

The authors examine a variant of the uncapacitated lot-sizing model of Wagner-Within involving sales instead of fixed demands, and lower bounds on stocks. Two extended formulations are presented, as well as a dynamic programming algorithm and a complete description of the convex hull of solutions.

This paper defines a decomposition of technical efficiency for a series of nonparametric deterministic reference technologies related to the Free Disposal Hull. More specifically, introducing several returns to scale assumptionsinto this non-convex production model allows one to distinguish...

The purpose of this note is to define a new and more general method to obtain qualitative information about returns to scale for individual observations. In a second section the traditional methods developed for estimating returns to scale on nonparametric deterministic reference technologies...