The aim of this paper is to use the concept of the metafrontier function to study the determination of efficiency differentials and Technological Gap Ratio (TGR) on wheat production in Khorasan Razavi province. In this study, we used the metafrontier function and group frontier based on the concept of Stochastic Nonparametric Envelopment of Data analysis (StoNED). The data used in this stud...

In panel stochastic frontier models, the Fixed Effects (FE) approach produces biased technical efficiency scores when time-invariant variables are important in the production process, and the Random Effects (RE) approach imposes distributional assumptions about the inefficiency. Moreover, technical efficiency scores obtained from these models are biased when the sample contains a large number o...

The paper is concerned with several kinds of stochastic frontier models whose likelihood function is not available in closed form. First, with output-oriented stochastic frontier models whose one-sided errors have a distribution other than the standard ones (exponential or half-normal). The gamma and beta distributions are leading examples. Second, with input-oriented stochastic frontier models...

By using a stochastic frontier framework, the mutual effect of input use on production risk and inefficiency is investigated. Disentangling this mutual effect proves important for empirical reasons, at least when applied to west Tennessee cotton systems grown after various cover crops. The most striking result is that the stochastic frontier model, when compared with a typical Just-Pope model, ...

Finite mixture estimation (FME) is compared to estimated generalized least squares (EGLS) in the estimation of economies of size and production cost frontiers for Alabama dairy farms. FME provides several unique insights into the economic forces behind recent changes in Alabama’s dairy industry. FME provides estimation of a stochastic average cost frontier with known statisticalproperties, whic...

This paper offers a review of investment performance appraisal methods. The review starts with an exhaustive coverage of various methods ranging from early measures of risk-adjusted return to more recent methods including the rating given by ASSIRT, a financial services organisation that assess managed investment in Australia. We then extend the discussion to performance evaluations based on th...

Frontier techniques, including data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), have been used to measure health care provider efficiency in hundreds of published studies. Although these methods have the potential to be useful to decision makers, their utility is limited by both methodological questions concerning their application, as well as some disconnect between the ...

The paper proposes to combine stochastic frontier models and linear programming methods by using DEA measures as priors of efficiency in the stochastic frontier model. These prior measures are revised to obtain posterior measures using Bayes theorem. Monte Carlo methods are developed to perform empirical Bayes inference in the new model. The methods are organized around Gibbs sampling with data...