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...

Proposals are often made to tax goods which are environmentally damaging. Many such goods are consumed both directly by households and industry at large: for example, carbon-intensive fuel, waste water or congested road space. This paper adopts a tax-reform setting to evaluate such a policy. The...

We investigate input pricing regimes that induce efficient make-or-buy decisions by entrants when there is constant returns in the production of the input(s) and simultaneous noncooperative price competition in downstream retail markets. A necessary and sufficient condition for efficient...

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...

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of cartelisation and managerial incentives on the productive efficiency of German coal mining corporations. We focus on coal mining in the Ruhr district, Germany’s main mining area. We use stochastic frontier analysis and an unbalanced dynamic panel data...

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...

Electricity distribution network is a prime example of a natural local monopoly. In many countries, electricity distribution is regulated by the government. Many regulators apply frontier estimation techniques such as data envelopment analysis (DEA) or stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) as an...