Article history: Received 1 October 2013 Received in revised form 1 October 2014 Accepted 5 November 2014 Available online 4 February 2015 This paper investigates the effects of software intellectual property rights (IPRs) on the performance of software firms. For this, technical efficiency scores for Korean software firms are examined, and for an empirical analysis, data envelopment analysis (...

On June 25, 2013, President Obama announced his plan to introduce carbon dioxide emission standards for electricity generation. This paper proposes an efficiency analysis approach that addresses which emission rates (and standards) would be feasible if the existing generating units adopt best practices. A new efficiency measure is introduced and further decomposed to identify different sources’...

In this paper we analyze the levels of technical efficiency and productivity growth attained by Spanish insurance companies during a period of deregulation. We compute Malmquist productivity indexes using the estimates of parametric distance function for several specialized insurance branches. In this way, we show that branch specialization matters a great deal and that firms combining two or t...

This study intends to understand how disaster is related to countries’ production efficiency using a sample of 137 countries over 1980–2011. We analyze the effect of the number of man-made and natural disaster occurrences on countries’ technological change (swift of the frontier) and technological catch-up (distribution of efficiencies). The results reveal an inverted “U” shape relationship bet...

The human development index (HDI) is a measure of development which allows countries’ development to be assessed on the basis of three indicators that measure the health, education, and standard of living of the population. The UNDP also computes a human development index that excludes this last indicator, the non-income HDI. The HDI, like the non-income HDI, presents some striking intercountry...

In renewable resource industries, labor is commonly paid with a share of operating profit rather than with a per unit-of-effort wage. This paper shows that the sharing agreements interact with fluctuations in the natural capital stock to cause inefficient investment levels and skew industry rents toward labor. As a consequence, optimal regulatory policy for such industries must account for the ...

Duality Theory of production imposes a number of simplifying assumptions regarding the production technology, including various maintained convexity assumptions. Emphasizing the technological information content of alternative models, this paper challenges some widely held views on the role of convexity. The role of convexity in Duality Theory is asymmetric: While convexity is of importance in ...

The aim of this work is to introduce a new econometric methodology for multioutput production frontiers. In the context of a system of frontier equations, we use a flexible multivariate distribution for the inefficiency error term. This multivariate distribution is constructed through a copula function which allows for separate modelling of the marginal inefficiency distributions and the depend...

This study compares activity-based costing (ABC) model and traditional costing method in Malaysia. Activity based costing (ABC) which was developed into the manufacturing/service sectors in Malaysia. It calculates the cost and performance of activities, resources and cost objects. It can be considered as an alternative model to Traditional Cost-based accounting systems. In this study the result...

This paper studies the interaction between barriers to firm entry and distortions allocative efficiency in a standard model of dynamics. We derive strategy infer based on cross-country differences size distribution idiosyncratic distortions. The inferred resemble regulation-based indicators advanced economies but are substantially higher middle- low-income countries. Regulation-based cannot acc...