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;...

Directional distances provide useful, flexible measures of technical efficiency of production units relative to the efficient frontier of the attainable set in input-output space. In addition, the additive nature of directional distances permits negative input or outputs quantities. The choice...

Over the past years a large number of regional growth theories have been developed and a number of models have been built in an effort to describe, explain and eventually predict regional development trends. However, until a few years ago, the large majority of those models assumed the existence...

The territorial organisation of economies and societies is undergoing a dramatic change. Globalisation, technological innovation, migration and population ageing make it increasingly difficult to predict the future of regions. Economic change tests the ability of all regions to compete and the...

This paper estimates the relative technical efficiency of Brazilian municipalities in the public education using the DEA model along with tobit regressions with the aid of re sampling methods. The jackstrap method enabled the estimation of robust efficiency scores, while the bootstrap allowed...