Two oil price shocks changed the pattern of cheap oil. The first was the Arab embargo on oil exports in 1973. Oil prices rose five fold. In 1978, the second was the fall of Shah Iran. Prices soared to $80-$100 a barrel in today‘s prices. In 1960, OPEC was established and since then it has been...

This research is devoted to analysis of efficiency estimation in presence of spatial relationships and spatial heterogeneity in data. We presented a general specification of the spatial stochastic frontier model, which includes spatial lags, spatial autoregressive disturbances and spatial...

This paper aimed at a statistical analysis of competition for tourists between regions within Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and estimation relative efficiency levels of regions. We apply a modern approach called Spatial Stochastic Frontier and corresponded to spatial modification of...

This paper is devoted to statistical analysis of spatial competition and cooperation between European airports. We propose a new multi-tier modification of spatial models, which allow estimating of spatial influence varying with the distance. Competition and cooperation effects don't diminish...

Still today Cameroon is suffering from a shy landscape of entrepreneurship and a private sector constituted at 90% by SMEs confronted to a lack of funding; The situation tends to increase with the advent of financial crisis. It is in this framework that this study tries to make an identification...

Estimating the manufacturing cost is a critical task with high importance to industrial firms. The cost estimating can drive bidding strategies, management of resources, production policies and other issues crucial to the economic success of the company. Essentially, cost estimation should be...

There has been a huge interest during the last decade on modelling hospital cost. Now that there is a fare amount of clarity achieved in estimating cost functions of hospitals, it is time to take stock of the existing methodologies. This article through a brief review of the past studies...

This paper analyzes multifactor models in the presence of a large number of potential observable risk factors and unobservable common and group-specific pervasive factors. We show how relevant observable factors can be found from a large given set and how to determine the number of common and...

Using a unique dataset collected in 59 rural Gambian villages, we study how ethnic heterogeneity is related to the structure of four economic exchange networks: land, labor, inputs and credit. We find that different measures of village-level ethnic fragmentation are mostly uncorrelated with...

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are gaining more and more weight in Latin America's public policy. Although there exists a wide range of literature about the impact of these programs on school matriculation, the reduction in child labour and the improvements in the health status of...