Since the late 1990s, the European higher education system has had to face deep structural changes. With the public authorities seeking to create an environment of quasi-markets in the higher education sector, the increased competition induced by recent reforms has pushed all publicly financed...

Stochastic frontier analysis is used to evaluate the technical and allocative efficiencies for banks classified based on industry specialization (agricultural and non-agricultural banks) and solvency condition (non-critical and critical banks). The analytical framework allows for comparisons of...

Flexibility can be considered as a crucial factor of competitive advantage, especially under conditions of dynamically changing environments. Based on the classical microeconomic definition of flexibility, as introduced by Stigler, and some recent concepts developed in the production economics,...

A non-neutral stochastic distance function model is used to examine whether output specialization has an impact on the economic performance of vegetable producers in Benin. Specialization is assumed to have an effect on the production frontier and on the distance to the production frontier...

This study examines economic performance and household behaviour in multiple crop farming in Vietnam by measuring scale and scope economies, technical efficiency, and elasticities of substitution between inputs. The farming system in Vietnam is being transformed by integration between a set of...

This study investigates the water demand of Indian manufacturing plants. It adopts an input distance function approach and approximates it by a translog form. Duality between cost function and input distance function is exploited to retrieve information concerning substitutability and the shadow...

This paper estimates regional economic efficiency differentials at the firm level in the Italian manufacturing sector over the period 1998-2003. We implement an input distance function approach providing measures of both technical inefficiency and allocative distortions in the choice of input...

This paper uses representative farm account data for 1985-2007 to estimate stochastic production frontiers in the form of input distance functions for Danish crop, dairy and pig farms. The objective is to study and compare scale economies for the three farm types. The estimated technical...

Since the late 1990s, the European higher education system has had to face deep structural changes. With the public authorities seeking to create an environment of quasi-markets in the higher education sector, the increased competition induced by recent reforms has pushed all publicly financed...

We estimate an input distance function for U.S. dairy farming to examine the competitiveness of organic and non-organic dairy production by system and size. Across organic/non-organic systems and size classes, size is the major determinant of competitiveness based on various measures of...