This study explores the relationship between cost inefficiency and profitability in the U.S. life insurance industry. Earnings have particular importance to life insurance companies because earnings and capital determine the viability of the insurer. Since the life insurance industry is mature...

Nonparametric efficiency analysis has become a widely applied technique to support industrial benchmarking as well as a variety of incentive-based regulation policies. In practice such exercises are often plagued by incomplete knowledge about the correct specifications of inputs and outputs....

The German potable water supply industry is regarded highly fragmented, thus preventing efficiency improvements that could happen through consolidation. Focusing on a hypothetical restructuring of the industry, we use a cross-section sample of 364 German water utilities in 2006, applying Data...

The aim of this paper is to provide a technical efficiency assessment of Taiwan’s incineration plants as the basis of incentive regulation schemes. We integrate the four-stage approach with Simar and Wilson’s (in J Econom 136:31–64, <CitationRef CitationID="CR32">2007</CitationRef>) double bootstrapping to filter out the impacts of...</citationref>

This paper treats efficiency measurement when some outputs are undesirable and producers control pollutants by end-of-pipe or change-in-process abatement. A data envelopment analysis framework that compares producers with similar pollution control efforts is proposed. First, my approach avoids...

This paper uses directional distance functions to extend the non-parametric metafrontier approach to efficiency measurement proposed by O’Donnell et al. (Empir Econ 34:231–255, <CitationRef CitationID="CR38">2008</CitationRef>) to the assessment of technological differences in eco-efficiency between groups of producers. Furthermore,...</citationref>

We propose an extension to the basic DEA models that guarantees that if an intensity is positive then it must be at least as large as a pre-defined lower bound. This requirement adds an integer programming constraint known within Operations Research as a Fixed-Charge (FC) type of constraint....

Radial projection is a standard technique applied in data envelopment analysis (DEA) to calculate efficiency scores for input and/or output variables. In this paper, we have studied the appropriateness of radial projection for target setting. We have created a situation where the decision making...