This study demarcates cost-inefficiency in Chinese banks into X-inefficiency and rent-seeking-inefficiency. A protected banking market not only encourages weak management and X-inefficiency but also public ownership and state directed lending encourages moral hazard and bureaucratic rent seeking. This paper uses bootstrap non-parametric techniques to estimate measures of X-inefficiency and rent...

The most commonly used approaches to parametric (stochastic frontier) analysis of efficiency in panel data, notably the fixed and random effects models, fail to distinguish between cross individual heterogeneity and inefficiency. This blending of effects is particularly problematic in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) panel data set on health care delivery, which is a 191 country, five year...

A stochastic frontier production function is defined for panel data on firms, in which the non-negative technical inetGciency effects are assumed to be a function of firm-specific variables and time. The inefficiency effects are assumed to be independently distributed as truncations of normal distributions with constant variance, but with means which are a linear function of observable variable...

This paper introduces a new estimation method for time-varying individual effects in a panel data model. An important application is the estimation of time-varying technical inefficiencies of individual firms using the fixed effects model. Most models of the stochastic frontier production function require rather strong assumptions about the distribution of technical inefficiency (e.g., half-nor...

Two very different articles in this issue deal with the same important subject: workflow redesign. It’s a topic that is at the same time important and often slighted, largely because workflow – the way we do what we do day after day – tends to become such a well-traveled route that we may forget that other ways may lead us to the same end more quickly and efficiently. When workflow issues do ...

Subsidies are considered important means to facilitate the provision of public transit, yet the empirical evidence implies that they can have harming effects on costs and possibly also on operators’ performance. This paper examines the impacts of deficit-balancing subsidies on the cost inefficiency of local public bus companies in Germany, where a complex system allocates ample financial suppor...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure, and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) on a multifaceted administrative German dataset combined with the balanc...

This paper aims to estimate a translog stochastic frontier production function in the analysis of a panel of 150 mixed Catalan farms in the period 1989-1993, in order to attempt to measure and explain variation in technical inefficiency scores with a one-stage approach. The model uses gross value added as the output aggregate measure. Total employment, fixed capital, current assets, specific co...