Healthcare institutions worldwide are increasingly the subject of analyses aimed at defining, measuring and improving organizational efficiency. However, despite the importance of efficiency measurement in healthcare services, it is only relatively recently that the more advanced econometric and mathematical programming frontier techniques have been applied to hospitals, nursing homes, health m...

The use of non-parametric frontier methods for the evaluation of product market efficiency in heterogeneous markets seems to have gained some popularity recently. However, the statistical properties of these frontier estimators have been largely ignored. The main point is that nonparametric frontier estimators are biased and that the degree of bias depends on specific sample properties, most im...

In portfolio theory, it is well-known that the distributions of stock returns often have non-Gaussian characteristics. Therefore, we need non-symmetric distributions for modeling and accurate analysis of actuarial data. For this purpose and optimal portfolio selection, we use the Tail Mean-Variance (TMV) model, which focuses on the rare risks but high losses and usually happens in the tail of r...

Road safety index is an important indicator that has been recently introduced as a useful tool to measure the quality of life in many countries and cities. Road safety index is a complex index and it has at least three main components, including road user behavior, vehicle safety, and road infrastructure effects. Many researchers have selected studying road performance from road safety index pe...

Although a rich literature has emerged analyzing the impact of localization, urbanization, and Jacobs externalities on regional innovativeness, the findings are still contradictory. Traditional studies differ mainly in the employed data but rely on similar empirical approaches. This paper argues in favor of using in this context production frontier approaches instead of the commonly employed pr...