Policy recommendations concerning optimal scale of production units often have serious implications for the restructuring of a sector, while tests of natural monopoly have important implications for regulatory structure. The piecewise linear frontier production function framework is becoming the...

Policy recommendations concerning optimal scale of production units often have serious implications for the restructuring of a sector, while tests of natural monopoly have important implications for regulatory structure. The piecewise linear frontier production function framework is becoming the...

In economics scale properties of a production function is charcterised by the value of the scale elasticity. In the field of efficiency studies this is also a valid approach for the frontier production function. It has no good meaning to talk about scale properties of inefficient observations....

The purpose of this article is to provide a deeper empirical insight into the structural change of an industry which is more relevant than that obtained by an analysis based on the traditionally estimated average production function. The main contribution is a long run analysis of technical...

No abstract.

Technical change in general milk processing is estimated within a homothetic frontier production function allowing neutrally variable scale elasticity. The results show that technical progress is characterized by a rapid increase in optimal scale and a small capital saving bias, increasing the...

This paper is concerned with the measurement of productive efficiency. Farrell's measures of efficiency are generalized to nonhomogeneous production functions. Several new measures of efficiency have been introduced and applied to the Swedish milk processing industry. The empirical analysis is...

The performance of local tax offices of Norway is studied over a three-year period using Data Envelopment Efficiency analysis and calculating Malmquist productivity indices. One input, labour, is used, and six output categories of the main service activities carried out by tax offices are...

Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...