Directional distance functions provide very flexible tools for investigating the performance of Decision Making Units (DMUs). Their flexibility relies on their ability to handle undesirable outputs and to account for non-discretionary inputs and/or outputs by fixing zero values in some elements...

Although the role of universities in the knowledge society is increasingly significant, there remains a severe lack of systematic quantitative evidence at the micro-level, with virtually all policy discussion based on country level statistics or case studies. This book redresses the balance by...

Efficiency scores of production units are generally measured relative to an estimated production frontier. Nonparametric estimators (DEA, FDH, \cdots ) are based on a finite sample of observed production units. The bootstrap is one easy way to analyze the sensitivity of efficiency scores...

In a single index Poisson regression model with unknown link function, the index parameter can be root-n consistently estimated by the method of pseudo maximumum likelihood. In this paper, we study, by simulation arguments, the practical validity of the asymptotic behavior of the pseudo maximum...

In frontier analysis, most of the nonparametric approaches (DEA, FDH) are based on envelopment ideas which suppose that with probability one, all the observed units belong to the attainable set. In these "deterministic" frontier models, statistical theory is now mostly available. In the presence...

When analyzing the productivity of firms, one may want to compare how the firms transform a set of inputs x (typically labor, energy or capital) into an output y (typically a quantity of goods produced). The economic efficiency of a firm is then defined in terms of its ability of operating close...

In frontier analysis, most of the nonparametric approaches (DEA, FDH) are based on envelopment ideas which suppose that with probability one, all the observed units belong to the attainable set. In these “deterministic” frontier models, statistical theory is now mostly available (Simar and...

Non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) estimators based on linear programming methods have been widely applied in analyses of productive efficiency. The distributions of these estimators remain unknown except in the simple case of one input and one output, and previous bootstrap methods...

In frontier analysis, most of the nonparametric approaches (DEA, FDH) are based on envelopment ideas which suppose that with probability one, all the observed units belong to the attainable set. In these "deterministic" frontier models, statistical theory is now mostly available. In the presence...