On June 25, 2013, President Obama announced his plan to introduce carbon dioxide emission standards for electricity generation. This paper proposes an efficiency analysis approach that addresses which mission rates (and standards) would be feasible if the existing generating units adopt best...

In this paper we analyze the economic effects of implementing EPA's newly proposed regulations for carbon dioxide (CO2) on existing U.S. coal-fired power plants using nonparametric methods on a sample of 144 electricity generating units. Moreover, we develop an approach for evaluating the...

In this paper we propose a stochastic formulation of the materials balance condition which imposes physical constraints on production technologies. The estimation of the model involves a composed error term structure that is commonly applied in the literature on stochastic frontier analysis of...

We conduct an empirical analysis of the technical efficiency of cars sold in Germany in 2010. The analysis is performed using traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) as well as directional distance functions (DDF). The approach of DDF allows incorporating the reduction of carbon dioxide...

In this paper we present a new approach to evaluate the environmental efficiency of decision making units. We propose a model that describes a two-stage process consisting of a production and an end-of-pipe abatement stage with the environmental efficiency being determined by the efficiency of...

This study explores the reduction potential of greenhouse gases for major pollution emitting countries of the world using nonparametric productivity measurement methods and directional distance functions. In contrast to the existing literature we apply optimization methods to endogenously...