Based on Cuesta (2000), this paper develops a stochastic frontier production model that allows for different groups of firms to have different patterns of technical efficiency over time. The authors apply the model to the Malaysian manufacturing sector to decompose total factor productivity...

E(Electronic)-learning becomes more and more important. Reasons are the paramount importance of knowledge, life-time learning, globalization and mobility. Not all providers of e-learning products succeed in closing the gap between production costs and revenues. Especially in the academic sector...

Rapidly rising carbon emissions from the intense development of Western Canada's fossil fuels continue to aggravate the global climate emergency and destabilize democratic structures. The urgency of the situation demands not only scholarly understanding, but effective action. Regime of...

The aim of this study is to identify and classify the most important factors affecting patient satisfaction in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis considering economic effects. This is an analytical study using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method and ANN-MLP (Artificial neural network based on...

Resource curse theory claims that resource abundance encourages violent conflict. A study of 37 oil-producing developing countries, however, reveals that oil states with very high levels of oil revenue are remarkably stable. An analysis of the ways in which governments spend oil revenues...

Political connections between firms and autocratic regimes are not secret and often even publicly displayed in many developing economies. We argue that tying a firm's available rent to a regime’s survival acts as a credible commitment forcing entrepreneurs to support the government and to...

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary...

We study the association between resource rents and political stability, highlighting the importance of the distribution of political power as a mediating factor. We present a simple theoretical model showing that increased rents are likely to be positively associated with the stability of a...