BACKGROUND The casemix-based payment system has been adopted in many countries, although it often needs complementary adjustment taking account of each hospital's unique production structure such as teaching and research duties, and non-profit motives. It has been challenging to numerically evaluate the impact of such structural heterogeneity on production, separately of production inefficiency...

This paper examines whether and to what extent off-farm employment affects the technical efficiency of agricultural production. The level of technical efficiency is measured using a stochastic frontier production function approach. We find that there is a positive significant effect of off-farm employment on the level of technical efficiency. We also find that fragmentation of farmland is a bar...

Meat goat enterprise efficiency was estimated using an input distance function (IDF) by applying stochastic production frontier techniques for the southeastern U.S. region. We found increasing returns to scale and scope economies for southeastern U.S. meat goat enterprises. Mean technical efficiency was 0.81. Our results suggest southeastern U.S. meat goat enterprises can be scale efficient if ...

The stochastic frontier model used for continuous dependent variables is extended to accommodate output measured as a discrete ordinal outcome variable. Conditional on the inefficiency error, the assumptions of the ordered probit model are adopted for the log of output. Bayesian estimation utilizing a Gibbs sampler with data augmentation is applied to a convenient re-parameterisation of the mod...

The paper proposes to combine stochastic frontier models and linear programming methods by using DEA measures as priors of efficiency in the stochastic frontier model. These prior measures are revised to obtain posterior measures using Bayes theorem. Monte Carlo methods are developed to perform empirical Bayes inference in the new model. The methods are organized around Gibbs sampling with data...

A lot is known about the Hölder regularity of stochastic processes, in particular in the case of Gaussian processes. Recently, a finer analysis of the local regularity of functions, termed 2-microlocal analysis, has been introduced in a de-terministic frame: through the computation of the so-called 2-microlocal frontier, it allows in particular to predict the evolution of regularity under the a...