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 growth of China's industry has been seriously depending on energy and environment. This paper attempts to apply the directional distance function and the Luenberger productivity index to measure the environmental efficiency, environmental total factor productivity, and its components at the level of subindustry in China over the period from 1999 to 2009 while considering energy consumption ...

There are two sources of inefficiency of strategic equilibria (SE) in market mechanisms. The first is the oligopolistic effect, which occurs when an agent can single-handedly influence prices. With a continuum of agents we get ‘perfect competition’ and this effect is, of course, wiped out. But the inefficiency of SEs may nevertheless persist because agents are not ‘perfectly liquid’, i.e., the ...

Time-varying risk premia (TVRP) is one of the four sources of stock return autocorrelation. TVRP arises in a securities market equilibriumwhen the equilibrium expected returns of the available investments vary over time; in particular, the presence of TVRP does not indicate pricing inefficiency. This paper provides equilibrium upper bounds on TVRP, as a function of the return period, the time h...

Market distortions can lead to resource misallocation, which can further lead to inefficiency. Throughout the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, qualitative evidence of various sources of distortion abounds. No study, however, has quantified the inefficiency in the slave trade due to these distortions. We use a structural approach to identify the dispersion of distortions in the slave t...

A Shake and Bake machine translation algorithm for Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar is introduced based on the algorithm proposed by Whitelock for unification categorial grammar. The translation process is then analysed to determine where the potential sources of inefficiency reside, and some proposals are introduced which greatly improve the efficiency of the generation algorithm. Prelimin...

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 ...

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 analyzes an overlapping generation model of public good provision under repeated voting. The public good is financed through age-dependent taxation that distorts human capital investment. Taxes redistribute income both across different skill groups and across generations. We contrast the political equilibria with the Ramsey allocation, and analyze the sources of inefficiency. The pol...