This paper examines how productivity changes contribute to short-run cost variations over time and across railroads. Using an unbalanced panel of US Class I railroad data for the period 1996-2003, decomposition models were used to attribute intertemporal and multilateral cost variations to their...

The literature to date on the effect of demand uncertainty on public hospital costs and excess capacity has not taken into account the role of expense preference behaviour. Similarly, the research on expense preference behaviour has not taken demand uncertainty into account. In this paper, we...

We investigate the impact of rate-of-return regulation on the substitutability between pairs of inputs, where substitutability is measured using Morishima elasticities of substitution (MES), and on operating cost. Theory does not provide a qualitative characterization of the impact of regulation...

The aim of this paper is to study excess capacity in National Health System (NHS) hospitals, which have the characteristics of a bureaucracy, within a theoretically consistent framework. In this sense, we develop and estimate an empirical model which has not previously been applied to this...