Non-radial measures of technical efficiency essentially differ from their radial counterparts in that the product mix of the efficient reference is allowed to be different from the product mix of the evaluated observation. Whereas existing non-radial measures are still based on the product mix...

We argue that efficiency assessments of academic research should focus on micro-units of research production rather than on conventionally employed (aggregated) macro-units, and show that such a detailed analysis of research performance provides interesting insights. In addition, we propose a...

We develop a positive non-parametric model of public sector production that allows us to test whether an implicit procedure of cost minimization at shadow prices can rationalize the outcomes of public sector activities. The basic model focuses on multiple C-outputs and does not imply any...

The United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI) takes several dimensions ---income, school enrolment and literacy rate, longevity--- and combines them into a single figure that measures the degree of development of a given country. However, there is disagreement about (i) how to normalize the...

There is a general interest in ranking performances (e.g., in sports or policy), which essentially implies aggregating several performance dimensions. The usual approach considers a 'cardinal' linear weighting of the different single-dimensional performance indicators. We present an alternative...

I survey the results of empirical research, showing that the opinions about distributive justice of the population at large are in sharp conflict with the assumptions of traditional welfare economics. I focus on the results concerning welfarism and concerning the Pigou-Dalton transfer criterion....

Lack of information about technology and prices often hampers the empirical assessment of the validity of the profit maximization hypothesis. We show that the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology comprises natural tools for dealing with such incomplete information. In...

The axiomatic literature on technical efficiency measurement has drawn attention to the indication problem of the Debreu-Farrell (DF) measure. We follow a shadow price approach to preserve the DF benchmark while reconciling it with the Koopmans efficiency characterization. First, we define a set...

To take into account heterogeneity in a social welfare function, Ebert (1997) and Shorrocks (1995) show that the only consistent way of welfare measurement consists of either constructing an artificial distribution in which each household is weighted by the number of equivalent individuals, or...

We propose a straightforward dominance procedure for comparing social welfare orderings (SWOs) with respect to the degree of inequality aversion they express. Three versions of the procedure are considered, each of which uses a different underlying criterion of inequality comparisons: (i) a...