One of the main characteristics of the technological capabilities of countries has always been their uneven distribution across the countries. This paper explores the dynamic of technological capabilities for a sample of 42 countries over the period 1995-2007 introducing some methodological...

In this paper it is shown that a well known procedure (GEKS) of transitivizing a bilateral system of productivity comparisons is implicitly a way of imposing a homothetic structure onto the data. The main implication of this result is that deviations between the bilateral and the multilateral...

In this paper we introduce a state-space approach to the econometric modelling of cross-sectional specific trends (temporal variation in individual heterogeneity) and time varying slopes in the context of panel data regressions. We show that our state-space panel stochastic frontier model nests...

Despite its economic development, the average length of trials in Italy is one of the highest in the world. In this paper we analyze the efficiency of the Italian courts of justice for the period 2003 to 2008. Results show that technical efficiency (lack of best practice adoption) is almost 40%...

In this paper an encompassing empirical strategy is presented which is able to decompose an indicator of industrial structural inefficiency into its sources components. The main purpose of the analysis is to bring a number of ideas floating in the efficiency literature together in the same...

The endogenous approach to regional development policy has become central over the last decade. By employing the conditional frontier approach, this paper investigates the relative contribution to labour productivity growth of: (1) capital accumulation, (2) exogenous technical change and...

A primal index of productivity change is introduced which decomposes exactly in three components: technical change, technical efficiency change and average scale economies (radial scale change). The proposed index is invariant to movement along indifference surfaces and it collapses to the...

In this paper we examine the efficiency of public service delivery at regional level in two countries, the UK and China. We introduce a method based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) which measures the aggregate country level inefficiency. This country level inefficiency is then decomposed into...

When analyzing productivity and efficiency of firms, stochastic frontier models are very attractive because they allow, as in typical regression models, to introduce some noise in the Data Generating Process. Most of the approaches so far have been using very restrictive fully parametric...