This study addresses an important dimension concerning the softwood lumber trade dispute between United States and Canada-substitutability among imported and domestically produced species. We employ the restricted translog subcost function approach to study this issue based on the monthly data of US softwood products consumption and prices between Jan. 1989 and July 2001. The results show that ...

China’s hog production is undergoing a great transformation due to the soaring demand and changing raising system. Regarding the essential role of pork in Chinese diet, a systematic analysis on the productivity and efficiency of hog production can provide significant implications for policy makers. This paper investigates the productivity and efficiency of hog production and determinants of tec...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of the East German economy at the firm level using an unbalanced panel over the transition period 1994 to 1998. We adopt a translog stochastic frontier model to estimate technical efficiency in eastern and western Germany. The results indicate that firms in eastern Germany are significantly less efficient than firms in western Germany. The...

We estimate changes in market structure in the US electric power industry during the last three decades using two independent approaches. First, we estimate an industry-wide conjectural-variations parameter. We find that industry concentration was generally rising during the 1970s, but has been gradually and consistently falling since the early 1980s. To check the robustness of these results, w...

The goal of this essay is to examine estimates of individual bank X-efficiency across time. First, we estimate a translog flexible function specification of bank efficiency during the period 1988-1997. Then, we estimate a time-series/cross-sectional model with independent variables that reflect business cycle and monetary policy conditions that may affect bank performance. Like Calomiris and Ma...

In order to reduce SO2 emissions to less than 2.5 lbs/mBtu as mandated by the Clean Air Act Amendment (CAAA) of 1990, power companies mainly using higher sulfur content coal as fuel supplies have to find their alternatives to reduce SO2 emissions. The purpose of the study is to assess the extent of economies of scale in coal delivery. The network of coal flow consists of production sites, consu...

This paper investigates whether the efficiency effect of product market dispersion is a function of the infrastructural and policy environment. We hypothesize that more developed transportation and communication infrastructure and lower government regulation may reduce transaction costs, intensifying the competition associated with a given market structure, and we use data from the recently lib...