This study presents an empirical analysis of the cost efficiency of a sample of Swiss multi-utilities operating in the distribution of electricity, natural gas and water. The multi-utilities that operate in different sectors are characterized by a strong unobserved heterogeneity. Therefore the measurement of their performance poses an important challenge for the regulators. The purpose of this ...

Based on a sample of about 600 state enterprises from 1980 to 1994, this paper investigates the productivity performance of SOEs using Data Envelopment Analysis and a Malmquist index. Our empirical results show that the average technical efficiency was low for these firms. Considerable productivity growth was found, but it was accomplished mainly through technical progress rather than through e...

It is shown that the core of a non-atomic glove-market game which is defined as the minimum of finitely many non-atomic probability measures is a von Neumann Morgenstern stable set. This result is used to characterize some stable sets of large games which have a decreasing returns to scale property. We also study exact non-atomic glove-market games. In particular we show that in a glove-market ...

The labour productivity differentials between manufacturing firms in Ghana and South Korea exceed those implied by macro analysis. Median value-added per employee is nearly 40 times higher in South Korea than Ghana. The most important single factor in explaining this difference is the Mincerian return to skills which differ by a factor of three between Ghana and South Korea. There is no signifi...

This paper proposes a simple model that formalizes a variant of Ohanian's (2001) conjecture explaining the productivity declines observed in the Great Depression. If a large payment shock like an asset-price collapse renders many firms insolvent, other economic agents become exposed to a higher risk of not being paid (payment uncertainty). The payment uncertainty causes endogenous disruptions o...

This paper seeks to investigate operating efficiency of the South Eastern European banking sector, an emerging region that has rarely been investigated, over the period 1998-2003 and to examine the relationship between operating costs and various banks’ characteristics. We compile the variables of our model using accounting data. Subsequently, we investigate banking production costs across seve...

What factors underlie industry differences in research intensity and productivity growth? We develop a multi-sector endogenous growth model allowing for industry specific parameters in the production functions for output and knowledge, and in consumer preferences. We find that long run industry differences in both productivity growth and R&D intensity mainly reflect differences in "technologica...

The productivity e¤ect of public infrastructure investment is controversial in the traditional literature using aggregate production function estimation, mainly due to reverse causality. This paper develops a new approach, using a model of endogenous productivity in a …rm-level production function, and matching Chinese …rm-level production data with province-level infrastructure data. The estim...

This paper analyzes the productivity performance of Chinese manufacturing firms from 1995 to 2003 by using a large-scale firm-level dataset from the National Bureau of Statistics, Peoples Republic of China. Over this period, a large number of firms were converted to stock holding companies, and an increasing presence of foreign-owned companies further accelerated structural changes in Chinese i...

This paper presents a new approach for quantifying bank’s management quality, using a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model that combines multiple inputs and outputs to compute a scalar measure of efficiency. This measure will seek to capture a fundamental and crucial element of a bank’s success, which is its management efficiency. The results show that, on average, differences in management qu...