This study models the joint production of good and bad output production and calculates traditional productivity when bad output production is regulated and when it is unregulated. We apply this model to data for U.S. coal-fired electric power plants for 1985-1995 and compare rates of...

In this paper, measures of capacity are developed following those suggested in 1968 by Leif Johansen. By taking advantage of Shephard?s duality, both primal and dual multi-output measures of capacity can be derived. Having generalized the capacity utilization measures, the authors show how these...

This paper introduces a decomposition of the Malmquist productivity index into component indexes. The motivation is to derive an analogue of the decomposition of the Tornqvist index into productivity and quality change provided by Fixler and Zieschang (1992) to the Malmquist index. Since we...

This paper studies the interaction between economic and environmental performance. Applying the directional output distance function approach, the purpose is to compare estimates of Luenberger total factor productivity indicators, including and excluding bad outputs. Specifically, based on...

We use a Monte Carlo experiment to compare the quadratic and translog functional forms in terms of their ability to approximate known frontiers that possess convex curvature. Unlike some of the existing simulation studies that have studied this topic, we find that both functional forms provide a...

The production of desirable (good) outputs is frequently accompanied by unintended production of undesirable (bad) outputs. If two or more of these undesirable outputs are produced as byproducts, one may ask: ‘Which bad is worst?’ By worst we mean which bad inhibits the production of...

This paper studies the interaction between economic and environmental performance. Applying the directional output distance function approach, the purpose is to compare estimates of Luenberger total factor productivity indicators, including and excluding bad outputs. Specifically, based on...

technology. Pollutants, or bads, are explicitly modeled by imposing technology properties of disposability and null-jointness. With data on firms from Swedish manufacturing, we investigate the potential to reduce emissions, and we take a closer look at the pulp and paper sector. Dividing the...

In this paper we focus on specification of revenue functions in their dual price space. We consider two distance functions, both dual to the revenue function: Shephard output distance function and the directional output distance function, both in price space. The former is multiplicative,...