The Monetary Control Act of 1980 requires the Federal Reserve to charge customers for financial services, with the intent of improving the efficiency with which Fed offices deliver those services. Prior studies found little improvement in the efficiency of Fed check processing operations after...

The Data Envelopment Analysis method has been extensively used in the literature to provide measures of firms' technical efficiency. These measures allow rankings of firms by their apparent performance. The underlying frontier model is non-parametric since no particular functional form is...

In many parts of Europe, decades of production subsidies led to the steady intensification of agriculture in marginal areas, but the recent decoupling of subsidies from production decisions means that the future of farming in these areas is uncertain. For example, in the uplands of the United...