This paper offers a quantitative evaluation of the distribution of the welfare of a water privatization experience in Mali among the key economic agents. The assessment is based on an index number inspired by Bennet (1920). The main results are as follows. First, taxpayers are the main losers as residual subsidies are much higher than expected at the time of privatization. Second and contrary t...

This paper compares two second-generation dynamic energy demand models, a translog Ž . Ž . TL and a general Leontief GL , in the study of price elasticities and factor substitutions of nine Swedish manufacturing industries: food, textiles, wood, paper, printing, chemicals, non-metallic minerals, base metals and machinery. Several model specifications are tested with likelihood ratio test. There...

Estimation of Productivity in Korean Electric Power Plants: A Semiparametric Smooth Coefficient Model This paper analyzes the impact of load factor, facility and generator types on the productivity of Korean electric power plants. In order to capture important differences in the effect of load policy on power output, we use a semiparametric smooth coefficient (SPSC) model that allows us to mode...

In labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, the matching between firms and workers may be assortative, meaning that the most productive workers and firms team up. We investigate this with longitudinal population-wide matched employer-employee data from Portugal. Using dynamic panel data methods, we quantify a firm-specific productivity term for each firm, and we relate this to the skil...

In this work we classify the singularities obtained from the Gibbs potential of a lattice gas model with three components, two order parameters, and five control parameters applying the general theorems provided by catastrophe theory. In particular, we clearly establish the existence of Landau potentials in two variables or, in other words, corank-2 canonical forms that are associated with the ...

We construct an endogenous growth model and we employ empirical analysis to investigate the link between foreign aid and production inefficiency in the presence of different political orientations in the recipient country. Using a panel of 124 countries from 1971 to 2007 and the production frontier toolbox, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, time horizons, the sources of aid, and the tim...

Using a panel of 9292 UK manufacturing firms over the period 1993-2003, we explore the links between firms’ financial health and their export market participation decisions. We find that exporters exhibit better financial health than non-exporters. Yet, when we differentiate between continuous exporters and starters, we see that this result is driven by the former. Starters generally display lo...

We use a firm production function approach to generate estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) and labor productivity in the manufacturing sector for a group of Latin American countries. We exploit these estimates to study the relative position of countries within this sector and to explore the main correlates of firm productivity. We find that while the exact ranking of average TFP is sen...

The main aim of this paper is to determine the factors which enhance or temper firms’ private incentives to use communications technologies that are characterised by network externalities and allow firms to influence their rate of technological change or total factor productivity (TFP). As regards the impact of the network effect on TFP, we find that when the externality parameter is low, a sli...

On a noncommutative space of rank-1, we construct a codimension-one soliton explicitly and, in the context of noncommutative bosonic open string field theory, identify it with the D24-brane. We compute the tension of the proposed D24-brane, yielding an exact value and show that it is related to the tension of the co-dimension two D23-brane by the string T-duality. This resolves a puzzle posed b...