Why Is the Public Sector More Labor-Intensive? A Distortionary Tax Argument Government-run entities are often more labor-intensive than private companies, even with identical production technologies. This need not imply slack in the public sector, but may be a rational response to its wage tax advantage over private firms. A tax-favored treatment of public production precludes production effici...

One of the explanations for global imbalances is the self-financing behavior of credit-constrained firms in rapidly growing emerging markets. We use an extensive firm-level data set from several Asian countries during 2002–2011, and test the micro foundation of this theory by estimating the effect of an exogenous change in credit constraints, resulting from financial reforms, on firms’ saving b...

Studies have demonstrated that oncolytic adenoviruses based on a 24 base pair deletion in the viral E1A gene (D24) may be promising therapeutics for treating a number of cancer types. In order to increase the therapeutic potential of these oncolytic viruses, a novel conditionally replicating adenovirus targeting multiple receptors upregulated on tumors was generated by incorporating an Ad5/3 fi...

This paper compares parametric and non-parametric estimates of productivity change in European banking between 1994 and 2000. Productivity growth has also been further decomposed into technological change, or change in best practice, and efficiency change. Both the parametric and non-parametric approaches consistently identify those systems that have benefited most (and least) from productivity...

This paper explores the relationship between patterns of productivity growth and the development stage of an industry, using firm-level data on the cotton-spinning industry in Japan in the late-nineteenth century. It is found that patterns of productivity growth depend on the development stage of the industry. In the earlier stage of industrial development, the productivity growth of each firm,...

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...