In this paper we explore in depth the effect of process innovations on total factor productivity growth for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), taking into account the potential endogeneity problem that may be caused by self selection into these activities. First, we analyse whether the ex-ante...

This paper is concerned with significance testing of the effects of exogenous determinants upon the one-sided deviation term of a semiparametric stochastic frontier model. Two nonparametric significance tests for all or a subset of the determinants of inefficiency are proposed. The proposed...

The challenge of the econometric problem in production efficiency analysis is that the very efficiency scores to be analyzed are unobserved. Recently, statistical properties have been discovered for a class of estimators popular in the literature, known as data envelopment analysis (DEA)...

Nonparametric estimators are widely used to estimate the productive efficiency of firms and other organizations, but often without any attempt to make statistical inference. Recent work has provided statistical properties of these estimators as well as methods for making statistical inference,...

This paper provides simulation evidence concerning some statistical properties of two different approaches to technical efficiency estimation for multiple-output production under noisy conditions: The Ray Frontier Approach (RFA) from Löthgren (1997) DEA+ proposed in Gstach (1996). RFA, unlike...

We introduce a simple new hypothesis testing procedure, which, based on an independent sample drawn from a certain density, detects which of $k$ nominal densities is the true density is closest to, under the total variation (L_{1}) distance. We obtain a density-free uniform exponential bound for...