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...

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...

This paper analyzes the performance of the European railway sector in the period of deregulation (1990-2005). Using a stochastic frontier panel data model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity a multiple-output multipleinput distance function model is estimated in order to evaluate the...

Since the late 1990s, the European higher education system has had to face deep structural changes. With the public authorities seeking to create an environment of quasi-markets in the higher education sector, the increased competition induced by recent reforms has pushed all publicly financed...

Scale characteristics are key properties of production functions that determine optimal firm sizes, and have considerable policy implications for sectors undergoing restructuring. However, estimates of scale characteristics typically vary with the assumptions of the underlying empirical model....

Economic theories explain the economic growth affected by accumulation of production factors and increase in productivity and efficiency. Traditional growth theories focus on the first factor where in developing countries, and especially due to the low input of capital, serious problems arise in...

Supermarkets are gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on productivity and efficiency have hardly been studied. We use a meta-frontier approach and combine this with propensity...

Este estudio estimó la forma funcional de producción cafetera en Colombia mediante fronteras estocásticas (FEP). Con esto, se analizó la importancia de los principales insumos empleados en la producción de café (cantidad de hectáreas cultivadas, mano de obra utilizada, maquinaria...

Based on a disaggregate cross-country analysis, we investigate the performance of 10 public Swiss universities and 77 public German universities from 2001-2007. During this period the universities in both countries have faced two major reforms aimed at improving efficiency and productivity in...

This article proposes a non-parametric approach to measure scale and scope and a descriptive study to address the relation of the railways' production density, scale scope and efficiency using a system of equations, graphic analysis, simple regressions and a proposal for the automatic selection...