With the economic downturn inflicting austerity on the British National Health Service, the issue of efficiency is of paramount importance for health care policy makers who are called upon to identify where efficiency savings can be made without hindering the quality of care. Research exploring...

In this paper we consider the sensitivity of functional form in the popular panel data stochastic frontier model proposed by Battese and Battese and Coelli (BC, 1992). We demonstrate that adopting the (t−T) efficiency functional form used by BC can, in a model which allows for firm specific...

This paper makes two important contributions to the literature on prediction intervals for firm specific inefficiency estimates in cross sectional SFA models. Firstly, the existing intervals in the literature do not correspond to the minimum width intervals and in this paper we discuss how to...

In this paper we first consider alternative measures of efficiency. We explain why simple partial productivity measures are inadequate as the basis of overall measures of efficiency, and outline two alternative approaches. The first is technical efficiency - the degree to which output is...