We examine differences in the efficiency of UK universities in providing research and teaching. It appears that (i) universities are more efficient in providing teaching than research, (ii) the variation of efficiency is larger in research than in teaching, and (iii) the degree of (in)efficiency...

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) scores have been used widely to assess instructors' performance in teaching, and it has been argued that instructors may "purchase" better evaluation scores by inflating students' grade expectations. In this paper, using a stochastic frontier model, we...

An economy's production set is the collection of all net output vectors that the economy is capable of producing with a given technology and fixed quantities of primary factors of production. The boundary of this set is called the production possibility frontier or PPF. We show that, if the...

A country's production possibility frontier or PPF is defined as the boundary of its economy's production set in the net output space for a given technology and fixed quantities of primary factors of production. In general equilibrium theory, exogenous changes in technology or primary-factor...

Ethiopia has failed to produce enough food to feed its population and the country has remained as one of the poorest countries in the world. Land degradation has been identified as one of the most serious problems that threaten the sustainability of agriculture in the country. In an effort to...

We use the stochastic frontier approach to estimate the impact of firm characteristics on investment decisions of Indian firms during the 1997-2006 period. The use of the stochastic frontier approach allows us to define the (unobserved) optimum investment that is consistent with a firm's...

Methodologically, the recommended investment project (IP) selection system is distinguished from one in force by: new conception allowing for time factor; evaluating IP efficiency by eventual reproduction results, not by intermediate investment activity results (included is a generalized...

We show that financial constraints may benefit innovation by improving the efficiency of innovative activities. We measure firm-level innovative efficiency by patents (or patent citations) scaled by R&D (research and development) investment or the number of employees, and find that financial...