Energy efficiency improvement (EEI) is generally known to be a cost-effective measure for meeting energy, climate and sustainable growth targets. Unfortunately, behavioral responses to such improvements (called energy rebound effects) may reduce the expected savings in energy and emissions from...

Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004;...

This paper provides an empirical demonstration for a practical approach of efficiency evaluation against the background of limited data availability in some regulated industries. Here, traditional DEA may result in a lack of discriminatory power when high numbers of variables but only limited...

Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier...

Efforts undertaken by France to restructure the allocation of governmental competencies increased the importance of subnational governments by transferring additional tasks. This paper analyzes the efficiency of public spending on an intermediate government level for a sample of 96 départements...

We analyze potential gains from hypothetical mergers in local public transport using the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis with bias corrections by means of bootstrapping. Our sample consists of 41 public transport companies from Germany's most densely populated region, North...

We develop a network technology model for pollution abatement that distinguishes between the two primary forms that abatement can take: Prevention of emissions from occurring in the first place, and treatment of any emissions that are generated by the production process. Our network model...

Forest fuel defined as branches and tops (GROT) of harvested trees represents a large share of forest biomass and is increasingly viewed as a potential energy source. This study assesses the economic potentials of forest bioenergy production in Swedish forests, using a network data envelopment...

In this paper, we measure the technical efficiency for local electricity distribution firms in Sweden, and in particular how small- and micro-scale generation affects efficiency scores. Using two-stage data envelope analysis to model the technical efficiency and a double bootstrap approach to...