Previous research has argued that debt financing affects equityholders’ investment decisions, producing substantial inefficiency. This paper shows that the size of this inefficiency depends on the degree of investment reversibility. In a dynamic model of financing and investment, the paper provides an upper bound for the inefficiency produced by debt financing. The upper bound is decreasing in ...

X.efficiency theory challenges the maximization postulate of standard economic theory. This paper shows that X-inefficiency is. at times, as much as 30 times greater than allocative inefficiency and suggests reasons for the existence of X-inefficiency—-i.e., (a) incomplete employment contracts, (b) discretionary effort, and (c) nonmaximization of profits. [The Social Sciences Citation Index® (S...

The growth of China's industry has been seriously depending on energy and environment. This paper attempts to apply the directional distance function and the Luenberger productivity index to measure the environmental efficiency, environmental total factor productivity, and its components at the level of subindustry in China over the period from 1999 to 2009 while considering energy consumption ...

This paper provides a concise review of a broad set of concepts, models and estimation issues in the field of stochastic frontier analysis. The goal is to provide practitioners with a quick guide to some key ideas. The review is restricted to single-output models estimated by econometric methods. Among the conceptual issues are the interpretation and the paths to reduce inefficiency. The modell...

This is the Second Edition of Lt.-Col. Hehir's book and is prefaced by a note from Sir O'Moore Creagh, the Commander-in-Chief in India. It is far and away the most useful book on Indian Military Hygiene that we have ever read and should be in the hands of all Medical Officers of the Army. It is so complete and thorough that it is difficult to give a full account of it, but in order that our rea...

Relative Efficiency, Scale Effect, and Scope Effect of Public Hospitals: Evidence from Australia Using the 1997-1998 New South Wales public-hospitals comparison data, we investigate the hospital-level inefficiency by applying a stochastic-frontier multiproduct cost function. We use a flexible translog cost function to reduce the measurement errors of the outputs of the hospital. The main findin...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to measure the technical and scale efficiency of the domestic waste management function in 103 New South Wales' local governments. After allowance is made for nondiscretionary environmental factors which may affect the provision of these local public services, such as congestion and the inability to operate machinery in densely-populated urban areas, comp...