Conditional efficiency captures efficiency of firms facing heterogeneous environmental conditions. Traditional approaches estimate nonparametrically conditional distribution requiring smoothing techniques. We rather use a flexible nonparametric location-scale model to eliminate the dependence of...

In production theory and efficiency analysis, we estimate the production frontier, the locus of the maximal attainable level of an output (the production), given a set of inputs (the production factors). In other setups, we estimate rather an input (or cost) frontier, the minimal level of the...

In this work, we analyze the performance of production units using the directional distance function which allows to measure the distance to the frontier of the production set along any direction in the inputs/outputs space. We show that this distance can be expressed as a simple transformation...

Frontier estimation appears in productivity analysis. Firm’s performance is measured by the distance between its output and an optimal production frontier. Frontier estimation becomes difficult if outputs are measured with noise and most approaches rely on restrictive parametric assumptions....

In this paper we propose a very flexible estimator in the context of truncated regression that does not require parametric assumptions. To do this, we adapt the theory of local maximum likelihood estimation. We provide the asymptotic results and illustrate the performance of our estimator on...