This article examines the productivity performance of Australia's manufacturing sector by decomposing its output growth into input growth, technological progress and gains in technical efficiency. This three-way decomposition is done with an improved version of the stochastic frontier model...

The influence of socio-economic factors and social affiliation on living standards is shown to be contingent on the living standard status of the household. This new result casts doubt on studies that use conditional mean regression analysis and the Oaxaca--Blinder decomposition analysis to...