This paper investigates the relative efficiency of 21 Swedish county councils through two efficiency models; one focusing on a traditional productivity measure (activity model) in terms of the production of intermediate outputs, and the other on quality outputs in the form of health-related...

Recent studies document a decline in U.S. labor-market fluidity from as early as the 1970s on. Making use of the Annual Social and Economic supplement to the Current Population Survey, I uncover a pronounced increase in job-to-job mobility from the 1970s to the 1990s, i.e. the annual share of...

Regulating seaports is difficult in general, even more so for the weak regulatory institutions common in developing countries. For this reason some countries have awarded these facilities via Demsetz auctions, to the port operator that bids the lowest cargo-handling fee. A major concern with...

This paper studies whether skilled migrants contribute to the host country's 'productive efficiency' (Farrell, 1957) using input-output and immigration sectoral data for seven industries in twelve countries during the period 1999-2001. We find that skilled migrants contribute positively to a...

Transition from socialist to market economy brought drastic changes to the Hungarian labour market. Employment fell by 1.6 million, i.e., by more than 25% during the early transition period, while unemployment jumped from practically nil to over 14% within four years. The rapid economic growth...

Using data from NLSY97 we analyze the impact of education on health behavior. Controlling for health knowledge does not influence the impact of education on health behavior, supporting the productive efficiency hypothesis. Accounting for cognitive ability does not significantly alter the...

The productive efficiency of a firm can be seen as composed of two parts, one persistent and one transient. The received empirical literature on the measurement of productive efficiency has paid relatively little attention to the difference between these two components. Ahn, Good and Sickles...

This paper provides evidence that ownership and organization matters for the efficiency of provision of public services. In particular, we find that pure private ownership is more efficient than pure public ownership, and public ownership is more efficient than mixed ownership. The delegation of...

The German reserve power market was subject to important regulatory changes in recent years. A new market design was created by synchronization and interconnection of the four control areas. In this paper, we analyze whether or not the reforms led to lower prices for minute reserve power (MRP)....

This paper investigates the time-path of efficiency and productivity change in the case of the Romanian cement industry 1966-1989. The analysis is based on different specifications of stochastic frontier models. The efficiency scores and the time paths of efficiency and technical change are...