Due to the advancing economisation and the associated discussion on the distribution of public budgets and tax revenues, the efficiency of higher education institutions is increasingly coming into focus. Since the 2000s, more and more studies on the efficiency of German universities have been...

Several approaches for subset recovery and improved forecasting accuracy have been proposed and studied. One way is to apply a regularization strategy and solve the model selection task as a continuous optimization problem. One of the most popular approaches in this research field is given by...

A nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is performed on hospitals in the federal state of Saxony (Germany) and in Switzerland. This study is of interest from three points of view. First, contrary to most existing work, patient days are not treated as an output but as an input. Second,...

The German potable water supply industry is regarded highly fragmented, thus preventing efficiency improvements that could happen through consolidation. Focusing on a hypothetical restructuring of the industry, we use a cross-section sample of 364 German water utilities in 2006, applying Data...

This paper analyzes research efficiency at the industry level in manufacturing for 13 European member and four nonmember countries during 2000 and 2004. A unique dataset was compiled that matches patent applications at the European Patent Office (EPO) to industry-specific R&D inputs from EU...

This paper aims to examine the relative efficiency of German engineering firms using a sample of roughly 23,000 observations between 1995 and 2004. As these firms had been successful in the examination period in terms of output- and export-growth, it is expected that a majority of firms is...

Applying an outlier robust extension of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) followed by a geoadditive regression analysis, this study identifies and decomposes the efficiency of 439 German regions in using infrastructure and human capital. The findings show that the regions' efficiency is driven...