Firm panel data sets over the period 1993 to 2002 are used to estimate translog production functions with labour, capital and material inputs for 9 Spanish food industries. To tackle the endogeneity of the regressors, the generalized method of moments estimations is employed. The specification...

Improving the productivity of the healthcare system, for example by taking advantage of scale economies or encouraging substitution of expensive specialist personnel with less expensive workers, is often seen as an attractive way to meet increasing demand within a constrained budget. Using data...

Energy and environmental efficiency evaluation has recently attracted increasing interest in China. In this study, we utilize the Range-Adjusted Measure (RAM) based nonparametric approach to evaluate the regional energy and environmental efficiency of China over the period of 2006-2010. The...

We empirically analyze the nature of returns to scale in active mutual fund management. We find strong evidence of decreasing returns at the industry level: As the size of the active mutual fund industry increases, a fund's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. At the fund level,...

We analyze the social optimality of growth and product variety in a model of endogenous growth. The model contains two sectors, one assembly sector producing a homogenous consumption good, and one intermediate goods sector producing a differentiated input used in the assembly sector. Growth...

A by-production-cum-preference based approach is adopted to study the relation between national income and environmental quality under non-cooperative behaviour. While emission is an inferior good for richly endowed economies, it is a normal good for the developing economies. With increases in...

Suppose that a group have demands for some good. Each one of them owns a technology to produce the good, with these technologies varying in their effectiveness. We consider technologies exhibiting either increasing return to scale (IRS) or decreasing returns to scale (DRS). In each case, we...

This paper derives the structure of a production function which is necessary and sufficient for generating a fixed cost. We extend the classical production function in order to allow each input to have a fixed and a variable part. We characterize and estimates both fixed and variable components...

Credit risk is crucial to understanding banks’ production technology and should be explicitly accounted for when modeling the latter. The banking literature has largely accounted for risk by using ex-post realizations of banks’ uncertain outputs and the variables intended to capture risk....