In the whole world there are strong discussions on how to yield a more equitable access and a more efficient provision. One issue linked to efficiency is the achievement of scale economies in the industry, and the optimal dimension of water and sanitation providers. Changes in the industrial...

This paper aims to analyse the impact of port demand variability on the allocative efficiency of Spanish port authorities during the period 1986-2007. From a distance function model we can obtain a measure of allocative efficiency using two different approaches: error components approach and...

In recent years, a number of studies have shown that institutions are crucial to economic development. This literature has highlighted a relationship between the quality of the macro-institutional environment and the performance of reform policies conducted in some key sectors of the economy....

In this paper we analyze the relationship between R&D spillovers and productivity. To this aim, we use data from 9th and 10th “Indagine sulle imprese manifatturiere” (IMM) surveys carried out by Capitalia. These two surveys, which cover the period 2001-2006, contain both quantitative and...

The purpose is to investigate the efficiency levels of commercial domestic versus foreign banks in France by comparing the use of basic accounting ratios and the stochastic cost and profit frontier analysis (SFA). We analyze the profit and cost efficiency of domestic and foreign banks operating...

Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period....

The objective of this paper is to use the techniques of Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) to estimate the increase or decrease of inefficiencies through time, as well as the linear programming procedure Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist index in order to analyze the sources of...