In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted, and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. However, an alternative interpretation is that hospitals with greater expertise in a treatment use it more because of their comparative advantage, ...

Using forecasts from Consensus Economics Inc., we provide evidence on the efficiency of real GDP growth forecasts by testing if forecast revisions are uncorrelated. As the forecast data used are multi-dimensional—18 countries, 24 monthly forecasts for the current and the following year and 16 target years—the panel estimation takes into account the complex structure of the variance covariance m...

Cooperative and mutual organisational forms arise for reasons that include contracting problems between parties. Economic literature suggests a variety of allocative inefficiencies implied by these forms that largely have their origins in poor investment decisions. We demonstrate that a multi-period model and the supplier and cooperative valuations it implies are essential for understanding the...

Measuring and improving the efficiency of the Chinese commercial banking system has recently attracted increasing interest. Few studies, however, have adopted the two-stage network DEA to explore this issue in the Chinese context. Because the entire operational process of the banking system could be divided into two sub-processes (deposit producing and profit earning), the evaluation of the sub...

Abstract Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: None. Background and Introduction Cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET) provides integrative information cardiovascular, pulmonary, muscular, cellular oxidative systems. Peak O2 consumption (VO2) ventilatory efficiency (VE/VCO2) are potent predictors poor outcome in heart failure (HF). Purpose We studied to find echocardiographic paramet...

This chapter examines the allocation of land and other productive resources within rural households of poor countries. Building upon the existing literature, it provides a consistent framework from which to study productive efficiency and intrahousehold equity. The topics discussed include: returns to scale and household centralization; specialization and gender casting; separate spheres and co...