Using quarterly micro data on capacity utilization among Swedish manufacturing firms, we show that idiosyncratic factors are much more important than aggregate influences in explaining variation in capacity utilization across firms and over time. Idiosyncratic does not mean unpredictable,...

Analyzing a comprehensive database of limited liability manufacturing firms this paper investigates the relation between a firm’s financial situation and its conditional expected growth rate. Specifically, using quantile regressions, we obtain a quantitative characterization of this relation...

The upper tail of the firm size distribution is often assumed to follows a Power Law behavior. Recently, using different estimators and on different data sets, several papers conclude that this distribution follows the Zipf Law, that is that the fraction of firms whose size is above a given...

This paper investigates the relevance of financial and economic variables as determinants of firm defaults. Our analysis is not limited to publicly traded companies but extends to a large sample of limited liability firms. We consider size, growth, profitability and productivity together with a...

The study of firms' default has attracted wide interest among both practitioners and scholars. However, attention has often been limited to a relatively small set of financial variables. In this work, we try to increase the scope of analysis extending the investigation to other possible...

Measuring productive efficiency is an important research strand within fields of economics, management science and operations research. One definition of efficiency is the proportional scaling needed for observations of an inefficient unit to be projected onto an efficient production function...

A new DEA model has been introduced recently combining the primal and the dual models in order to impose strong complementary slackness conditions. It was claimed that a reference set that contains the maximum number of efficient units can then be determined. The model is very interesting as a...

Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...

In der Aussenhandelstheorie wird das Angebot und die Nachfrage mit Hilfe der Dualitaetstheorie abgebildet. Dabei wird auf nationaler Ebene das Problem der Erloesmaximierung untersucht, wobei die nationalen Faktorbestaende und die Produktionstechnologien der einzelnen Unternehmen gegeben sind....