Entrant firms are constrained to set lower price–cost markups than incumbents due to idiosyncratic demand shocks faced in the startup phase. Productivity indices suffer from micro-level markup variation and underestimate entrants' productivity, when productivity is measured by nominal sales...

The electricity reform in Colombia has exhibited gains in terms of reliability but its effects on firm efficiency and service quality have not been clear. Previous studies evaluating the performance of distribution companies after the reform have not found evidence of improvements, although...

Most studies on measuring China's energy efficiency were conducted in the framework of the input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis. This approach generally calculates the technical efficiency by shrinking all the input factors equally proportionally subject to the observed output still being...

The importance of a scientific journal is usually established by considering the number of citations received by the papers that the journal publishes. In this way, the number of citations received by a scientific journal can be considered as a measure of the total production of the journal. In...

Predictive cost reduction based on a thermodynamic model, in which parameters associated with a process are accessed. The parameters include a quantity of units of work-in-process at first and second times, and first and second constants respectively indicative of growth between the first and...

The main aim of this paper is to compare two alternative methods for estimating frontier functions and measuring efficiency in production. The application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) to the same data panel provides insights in estimating technical...

Inadequate access to credit contributes to poverty among especially women in developing countries. It is evidenced that in patriarchal societies, males are likely to influence investment decisions when loans are granted to their spouses or female relatives. However the existing literature is...

In this paper, the choice of a particular functional form based on the objective of the author is called the subjective model selection rule and the choice of a particular functional form using pre-selected model selection criteria is called the passive model selection rule. The objective of the...

In the production function approach, an accurate output gap assessment requires a careful evaluation of the total factor productivity (TFP) cycle. We build a common cycle model that links TFP to capacity utilization and we show that, in almost all of the pre-enlargement EU countries, using...

The main aim of this paper is to derive the mathematical formulation to device an optimal purchasing policy for the service providing agency. An attempt has been made to maximize the output function of an agency subject to a nonlinear budget constraint by assuming that the agency gets price...