Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier...

A nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is performed on hospitals in the federal state of Saxony (Germany) and in Switzerland. This study is of interest from three points of view. First, contrary to most existing work, patient days are not treated as an output but as an input. Second,...

This paper investigates the performance and efficiency of the public sector in 74 countries worldwide for the years 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2000. Similar to what is done in Afonso / Schuhknecht / Tanzi (2005, Public Choice), I calculate performance measures for various fields of government policy,...

This study demarcates cost-inefficiency in Chinese banks into X-inefficiency and rent-seeking-inefficiency. A protected banking market not only encourages weak management and X-inefficiency but also public ownership and state directed lending encourages moral hazard and bureaucratic rent...

The existing Chinese banking system was born out of a state-planning framework focussed on the funding of state-owned enterprises. Despite the development of a modern banking system, numerous studies of Chinese banking point to its high level of average inefficiency. Much of this inefficiency...

We test whether output growth in European economic agglomeration regions depends on financial development. To this end we suggest a relative measure of the quality of financial institutions rather than the usual quantity proxy of financial development. In order to measure the quality of...

The stochastic frontier analysis (Aigner et al., 1977, Meeusen and van de Broeck, 1977) is widely used to estimate individual efficiency scores. The basic idea lies in the introduction of an additive error term consisting of a noise and an inefficiency term. Most often the assumption of a...

The traditional approach to measuring allocative efficiency is based on input prices, which are rarely known at the firm level. This paper proposes a new approach to measure allocative efficiency which is based on the output-oriented distance to the frontier in a profit – technical efficiency...

"Дискуссионные материалы" анализируют изменение эффективности и общей продуктивности факторов (англ. total factor productivity, TFP) крупных сельскохозяйственных...