Research on productive efficiency at the firm level has developed as an important and active strand of research the last decades, both within operations research, management science and economics. However, the interests pursued within the fields have had some differences regarding sound...

We discuss the nonparametric approach to profit efficiency analysis at the firm and industry levels in the absence of complete price information, and propose two new insights. First, choosing one commodity (whose price is known) as a numeraire good enables us to measure profit inefficiency in...

Numerous bank productivity studies indicate rapid changes in the structure of the financial services industry and advances in financial and nonfinancial technologies. Based on the literature review, this paper analyses the theoretical background of two concepts of performance evaluation – the...

This paper critically analyses, in the context of classical and neoclassical perspectives, the concepts of ‘returns to scale’ and ‘economies of scale’ by relating the former to the concept of ‘production unit’ and the latter to the concept of ‘firm’, and concludes that returns to...

This paper applies a new variant of data envelopment analysis model to examine the performance of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India. The findings show a significant heterogeneity visible in the cost efficiency scores within 19 years. The decline in performance after 1994-95 can be taken...

This paper measures environmental efficiency (EE) and environmental productivity (EP) and analyzes differences in these across countries. It explores the macro-economic factors that could explain these differences and whether these differences can be explained by income levels and by the degree...

We compute DEA efficiency scores and Malmquist indexes for a panel data set comprising 68 Portuguese public hospitals belonging to the National Health System (NHS) in the period 2000-2005, when several units started being run in an entrepreneurial framework. With data on hospital services' and...

Exploring and explaining development gaps between countries is an important theoretical and empirical task. This paper presents empirical studies related to economic growth and its determinants across countries, based on the use of data envelopment analysis method. It emphasizes the importance...

Background: Starting from the limitations of different single-method approaches to measuring the organizational efficiency, the paper is focused on covering both the financial and non-financial factors of this concept by combining two methods, namely the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Data...

This paper examines the relationship between financial market regulation, country governance and efficiency of commercial banks in East Asian economies during the period 2001-2008 using a two-stage estimation technique. In the first stage, we employ a non-parametric approach-Data Envelopment...