The economies of the former Soviet Bloc experienced large declines in output during the decade of transition which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet there are many reasons to believe that measured output and official deflators provide a poor proxy for the change in real...

In this presentation I view a Malmquist productivity index as a theoretical index with desirable properties. I then discuss the properties of three approximations to it: an empirical Malmquist index, and Fisher and Tornqvist indexes. Next I discuss the decomposition properties of the theoretical...

We define a segregation ordering as a ranking of cities from most segregated to least segregated. \ We propose a set of basic properties that any reasonable segregation ordering should have. \ We then fully characterize the class of segregation orderings that satisfy these basic properties. \ We...

In applied econometric literature, the causal inferences are often made based on highly temporally aggregated or systematically sampled data. A number of theoretical studies have pointed out that temporal aggregation has distorting effects on causal inference and systematic sampling preserves...

This paper examines the performance of the U.S.~commercial banking industry over 1984--2002. Rather than measuring performance relative to the unknown (and difficult-to-estimate) boundary of the production set, performance for a given bank is measured relative to {\it expected} maximum output...

The Stock--Watson coincident index and its subsequent extensions assume a static linear one-factor model for the component indicators. Such assumption is restrictive in practice, however, with as few as four indicators. In fact, such assumption is unnecessary if one poses the index construction...

Not all firms contributed to Australia’s impressive productivity growth in the 1990s. Some performed better than others, and entrants arrived even as incumbents exited. If firms make decisions on input demand and liquidation based on their productivity, the latter known to them...

This paper examines whether importing intermediate goods improves plant performance. While addressing the issue of simultaneity of a productivity shock and decisions to import intermediates, we estimate the impact of the use of foreign intermediates on plants' productivity using plant-level...

This paper applies a stochastic frontier production model to the data from Penn World Table’s 49 countries over the period 1965-1990, to decompose total factor productivity growth into technical change and technical efficiency change. Empirical results show East Asian countries led the...

Abstract Applying a Stochastic Production Frontier to sector-level data within manufacturing sector in India, this paper examines Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth during 1979-80 to 1997-98. The analysis focuses on the trend of technical progress (TP) and Technical Efficiency Change (TEC)....