The purpose of this paper is to sort out firm-related differences from effects that result from different economic structures. A non-parametric decomposition is used to analyse firm level difference between the wage spread in the two major regions of unified Germany. If firm-specific effects...

East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wages specified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wage gap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

Using individual level data from Turkstat Household Labor Force Survey for 2005-2009 period and a variety of parametric and semi-parametric techniques, we test two hypothesis regarding formal and informal labor markets: whether there is a wage gap between formal and informal workers and whether...

This paper presents identification and estimation results for a flexible state space model. Our modification of the canonical model allows the permanent component to follow a unit root process and the transitory component to follow a semiparametric model of a higher‐order...

While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple...

This paper analyzes the impact of load factor, facility and generator types on the productivity of Korean electric power plants. In order to capture important differences in the effect of load policy on power output, we use a semiparametric smooth coefficient (SPSC) model that allows us to model...

From an empirical perspective, this paper critically examines the concepts of returns to scale (RTS) and economies of scale (EOS), and argues that the concept of EOS is more relevant and broader enough to exhibit proper scale economies behavior of firms. Two approaches, i.e., production function...

Missing values are a major problem in all econometric applications based on survey data. A standard approach assumes data are missing-at-random and uses imputation methods, or even listwise deletion. This approach is justified if item non-response does not depend on the potentially missing...

How can we measure and compare the relative performance of production units? If input and output variables are one dimensional, then the simplest way is to compute efficiency by calculating and comparing the ratio of output and input for each production unit. This idea is inappropriate though,...

This paper describes a non-parametric, unconditional, hyperbolic quantile estimator that unlike traditional non-parametric frontier estimators is both robust to data outliers and has a root-n convergence rate. We use this estimator to examine changes in the efficiency and productivity of U.S....