This paper develops a new methodology for estimating cost-productivity and efficiency change that benchmarks the performance of individual firms against an estimated a-quantile. We adapt the estimators of Daouia and Simar (2007) and Wheelock and Wilson (2008a) to the estimation of cost...

Conventional approaches for inference about efficiency in parametric stochastic frontier (PSF) models are based on percentiles of the estimated distribution of the one-sided error term, conditional on the composite error. When used as prediction intervals, coverage is poor when the...

The number of commercial banks in the United States has fallen by more than 50 percent since 1984. This consolidation of the U.S. banking industry and the accompanying large increase in average (and median) bank size have prompted concerns about the effects of consolidation and increasing bank...

Although interest in ‘sustainable food’ has grown substantially in recent years, an official definition for sustainability has yet to be agreed upon. ‘Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming’ provide guidance to consumers wishing to make more sustainable food purchases, in the...

The number of U.S. commercial banks has declined by some 40 percent since 1984, primarily through mergers of solvent institutions. The relaxation of legal impediments to branching has enabled this consolidation, but specific characteristics of banks that engage in mergers reflect the regulatory...

This paper examines the performance of the U.S. commercial banking industry over 1984-2002. Rather than measuring performance relative to the unknown (and difficult-to-estimate) boundary of the production set, performance for a given bank is measured relative to expected maximum output among m...

This paper describes a non-parametric, unconditional, hyperbolic quantile estimator that unlike traditional non-parametric frontier estimators is both robust to data outliers and has a root-n convergence rate. We use this estimator to examine changes in the efficiency and productivity of U.S....

Since 1985, the share of U.S. depository institution assets held by credit unions has nearly doubled, and the average (inflation-adjusted) size of credit unions has increased over 600 percent. We use a non-parametric local-linear estimator to estimate a cost relationship for credit unions and...

This paper examines the technical efficiency of U.S. Federal Reserve check processing offices over 1980–2003. We extend results from Park et al. (2000) and Daouia and Simar (2007) to develop an unconditional, hyperbolic, a-quantile estimator of efficiency. Our new estimator is fully...