The problem of competitiveness has becoming one of the main concerns of European governments. This is reflected trough out the Europe 2020 Strategy that includes as key priority the promotion of efficient and productive use of inputs. Differently to other "well-behaved" European "neighbours", in...

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...

In this paper we study bulk shipping of coal between the central regions in the world. We compare the performance of cost-minimizing models with a gravity model approach. The main finding in the paper is that cost minimizing models provide relative poor fits to data. A simple one parameter...

Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004;...

In this paper, we demonstrate how a new network performance/efficiency measure, which captures demands, flows, costs, and behavior on networks, can be used to assess the importance of network components and their rankings.We provide new results regarding the measure, which we refer to as the...

In for-profit organizations, profit efficiency decomposition is considered important since estimates on profit drivers are of practical use to managers in their decision making. Profit efficiency is traditionally due to two sources - technical efficiency and allocative efficiency. The...

Wind power is one of the most promising renewable energy sources that has gained enormous attention, especially in the electricity generation sector over the past decade in the United States. In this study Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is implemented to quantitatively evaluate the relative...

We investigate the consistency of efficiency scores derived with two competing frontier methods in the financial economics literature: Stochastic Frontier and Data Envelopment Analysis. We sample 34,192 observations for all German universal banks and analyze whether efficiency measures yield...

The stochastic frontier analysis (Aigner et al., 1977, Meeusen and van de Broeck, 1977) is widely used to estimate individual efficiency scores. The basic idea lies in the introduction of an additive error term consisting of a noise and an inefficiency term. Most often the assumption of a...

Using micro-level panel data of about 35,000 firms from the German Cost Structure Census, we analyze the differences of technical efficiency across industries. Technical efficiency is estimated by firms' fixed effects. One striking result is that the distribution of technical efficiency across...