In the twentieth century there was a significant trend towards larger local governments through amalgamations in the western world. Amalgamations provide potential economic benefits but might also give rise to costs driven by opportunistic political behavior. This study uses a compulsory...

This paper investigates the effects of different health systems on cost efficiency in inpatient health care among the OECD countries. The results indicate that public contract systems are less efficient and that public integrated health systems are more efficient than public reimbursement systems.

This paper proposes an approach to specify and estimate multiple input, multiple output production frontiers and technical efficiency using a stochastic ray frontier production model A possible model extension is to incorporate a technical efficiency effects model to allow estimation of the...

This paper presents a new dynamic ARCH-related conditionally heteroscedastic stochastic frontier model specification where firm and time-specific technical inefficiency is represented by an autoregressive stochastic process in the error components. Monte Carlo results reveal that a one-sided...

This paper considers maximum likelihood estimation and inference in the two-way random effects model with serial correlation. We derive a straightforward maximum likelihood estimator when the time-specific component follow an AR(1) or MA(1) process. The estimator is easily generalized to...

The panel cointegration test of Larsson et al (1998) test for the maximum number of cointegrating relations in a dynamic panel given the assumption of a common cointegrating rank. This paper presents a test for this assumption. The test is based on the test statistic of Larsson et al (1998) and...

This paper presents a general likelihood-based framework for inference in panel-VAR models with cointegrating restrictions. The cointegrating relations are restricted to each cross-section while the rest of the model is unrestricted. The homogenous restriction of common cointegrating space is...

The relationships between firms' size, age and their growth rate are examined for a large sample of micro and small firms in Sweden. These firms have employees numbering in the range of 1-100 and are operating in a geographically concentrated area. Micro and small firms dominate the industrial...

This paper deals with a dynamic adjustment process in which adjustment of a key variable input (labor) towards its desired level is modeled in a panel data context. The partial adjustment type model is extended to incorporate firm- and time-specific adjustment parameter. A flexible (translog)...

This paper presents a likelihood-based panel test of cointegrating rank in heterogeneous panel models based on the mean of the individual rank trace statistics. The existence of the first two moments of the asymptotic distribution of the individual trace statistic is established. Based on this,...