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....

While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple...

Mehr als 1600 Verteilnetzbetreiber versorgen deutsche Haushalte mit Strom und Gas. Dabei handelt es sich um »natürliche Monopole«, d.h. es gibt keinen direkten Wettbewerb zwischen den Unternehmen, sondern werden sie durch die Bundesnetzagentur im Anreizregulierungsverfahren reguliert....

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;...

Hedonic land price models often use parcel size as an explanatory variable. Empirical analyses, however, are rather ambiguous regarding the direction and the size of the effect of this variable on farmland values. The objective of this paper is to investigate this size-price relation in detail...

This article investigates the role played by informational cost in agricultural land markets to explain price dispersion. Based on a hedonic model under incomplete information, we build a two-tier stochastic frontier. By linking costs of being information deficient to agent characteristics such...