Environmental factors add complexity to the comparison between specific activities or entire entities. Decision making units with an inferior performance are tempted to invoke that their organization is different from the others in the data set. By reinterpreting and extending the metafrontier...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...

Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier...

In the last ten years the space issue, i.e. the study of the role played by space in economic phenomena, has attracted a lot of interest from many economic fields. The combination of increasing returns, market imperfections, and trade costs creates forces that, together with factor endowments,...

In the last ten years the space issue, i.e. the study of the role played by space in economic phenomena, has attracted a lot of interest from many economic fields. Both the suitability of spatial economics to address questions posed by globalization, and improves in modeling techniques are at...

Households face a tradeoff between housing costs and commuting costs. Using a database that connects residence and workplace neighborhoods in eight larger metropolitan areas, we model the difference in housing costs as a function of estimated commuting distance. Based on the linear distance...

This paper proposes an empirical analysis of the sensitivity of Discrete Choice Model (DCM) to the size of the spatial units used as choice set (which relates to the well-known Modifiable Areal Unit Problem). Job's location choices in Brussels (Belgium) are used as the case study. DCMs are...