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...

Agricultural inputs are peculiar in nature as an asymmetry in their roles can be identified during the production process. These inputs can be grouped into a set of growth inputs or a set of facilitating inputs. The inputs affecting biological or physiological growth from the inside of the plant...

Radial and non-radial DEA models are distinguished on the basis of the presence of slacks. Viewing slacks as a possible source of inefficiency, this paper makes an empirical attempt to assess the relative strengths of these two sets of models in examining the total factor productivity change and...

This paper empirically examines the different variants of data envelopment analysis (DEA) models to select the large cap market securities in India in both constant and variable returns to scale environments. The results of this exercise are summarized as follows. First, there is a fall in...

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...

This article provides a generalization of the materials balance-based production model introduced by Coelli et al. (2007). Based on this, some new environmental efficiency (EE) measures are presented. The Coelli et al. (2007) EE measure and its extension by Rødseth (2016) produce biased...

Gender equality has been one of the goals of the European Union since 1957. Article 157 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union authorizes the European Parliament and the Council to adopt all those measures that guarantee the application of the principle of equality opportunities...

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...

When benchmarking production units by non-parametric methods like data envelopment analysis (DEA), an assumption has to be made about the returns to scale of the underlying technology. Moreover, it is often also relevant to compare the frontiers across samples of producers. Until now, no exact...

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...