Stochastic frontier models are widely used to measure, e.g., technical efficiencies of firms. The classical stochastic frontier model often suffers from the empirical artefact that the residuals of the production function may have a positive skewness, whereas a negative one is expected under the...

In Germany as in many other European countries there will be a shift in the age structure of the workforce in the next decades. The number of older workers will increase whereas the number of young and middle aged workers will decline. This paper provides evidence how the demographic ageing...

This paper examines firm-level productivity for German electricity retailers using a structural production function approach. The sector was subject to fundamental changes in market structure after retail liberalization in 1998. Competition was supposed to increase productivity and reduce retail...

Energy supply in Germany has undergone considerable changes during the last decade, of which especially the nuclear phase-out and enormous installations of renewable energy sources pose new challenges for conventional combustion technologies. To analyze potential adaption processes due to this...

A consensus has emerged that agglomeration economies are an important factor explaining why firms cluster next to each other. Yet disagreement remains over the sources of these agglomeration effects, given non-trivial measurement challenges. This paper is the first to present direct evidence...

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic voter model that rationalizes the ineff cient use of labor input in municipality-owned enterprises. Our focus is on the relationship between absolute as well as relative ineff ciency measures and the size of the municipality in which public rms operate....

This work decompose labor-productivity grotwh and convergence in EU into components attributable to technological change (shifts in the European production frontier), technological catch-up (movements toward or away from the frontier) and factor accumulation (movement toward or away from the...

The focus of the paper is on evaluating the productivity gap between rural and urban locations in the UK using micro data. We build a structural model of the unobservable productivity emphasising the link between productivity and spatial density of economic activity and adapt the semi-parametric...

Firms competitive strategy in industrialised countries is increasingly based on activities such as the inventions of new processes and products, the improvements of the employees skill, the creation of a reputation for company's products. All these actions are intended to increase firms economic...

In population declining countries, public services in rural areas face potential problematic issues on the long-run sustainability, which are namely brought by insufficient economies of scale. Since these services play important roles as social infrastructure elements, a disappearance from the...