The primary role of a bank branch is evolving from a service provider towards a sales channel. Previous branch-level studies of sales efficiency consider a static setting of a single time period, ignoring the stochastic nature of sales outcomes. In this paper, we examine efficiency and...

When benchmarking production units by non-parametric methods like data envelopment analysis (DEA), an assumption has to be made about the returns to scale of the underlying technology. Moreover, it is often also relevant to compare the frontiers across samples of producers. Until now, no exact...

Weak disposability between outputs and pollutants, defined as a simultaneous proportional reduction of both outputs and pollutants, assumes that pollutants are byproducts of the output generation process and that a firm can “freely dispose” of both by scaling down production levels, leaving...

Results of assessments of total labor factor productivity TFP showed improvements where it recorded higher rate of 73.5% compared to previous periods. However, that was related with constant rate of returns as compared with variable rate of return. When technical efficiency was compared with...

This paper contributes to the productivity literature by using results from firm-level productivity studies to improve forecasts of macro-level productivity growth. The paper employs current research methods on estimating firm-level productivity to build times-series components that capture the...

Convex Nonparametric Least Squares (CNLSs) is a nonparametric regression method that does not require a priori specification of the functional form. The CNLS problem is solved by mathematical programming techniques; however, since the CNLS problem size grows quadratically as a function of the...

Permutation techniques, where one recompute the test statistic over permutations of data, have a long history in statistics and have become increasingly useful as the availability of computational power has increased. Until now, no permutation tests for examining returns to scale assumptions,...