This paper estimates a translog stochastic frontier production function in the analysis of all 48 contiguous U.S. states in the period 1970-1983, to attempt to measure and explain changes in technical efficiency. The model allows technical inefficiency to vary over time, and inefficiency effects to be a function of a set of explanatory variables in which the level and composition of public capi...

Willingness to Accept Equals Willingness to Pay for Labor Market Estimates of the Value of Statistical Life Our research clarifies the conceptual linkages among willingness to pay for additional safety, willingness to accept less safety, and the value of statistical life (VSL). We present econometric estimates that in the important case of workers’ decisions concerning exposure to fatal injury ...

This paper employs a distribution dynamics approach to examine the empirical dynamics of technological specialisation in industrial countries. Using patent data, cross-sectional distributions at different time periods and Markov stochastic kernels are estimated nonparametrically for each country. Three are the main findings. There is a strong country size effect: economically “large” countries ...

China has been considered as such a successful example of enhancing economic growth by massive infrastructure investments in the past decades. A recent paper by Shi and Huang (2014) indicates a very big positive return of public infrastructure in China during 1995-2011 using China’s provincial-level data. However, the literature has provided con‡icting empirical results on the productivity e¤ec...

This study assesses the short and long-run behaviour of long-term sovereign bond yields in OECD countries, for the period 1973-2008. We employ a dynamic panel approach to reflect financial and economic integration, and to increase the performance and accuracy of the tests. Given the existence of cross-country dependence regarding sovereign yields and its determinants, we resort to simulation an...

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the efficiency with which Australian universities utilise their teaching resources. The study estimates the cost efficiency of 36 universities over the period 1995-2002 using stochastic frontier analysis. The present study differs from previous cost and efficiency studies of Australian universities in two respects. First, it employs stochastic frontier a...

Recent studies on the effects of anti-smoking policies on subjective well-being present mixed results and focus mainly on smokers. We contribute to the literature by exploiting the policy experiment provided by the UK public smoking bans and evaluating the impact of smoking bans on the subjective well-being of smokers, non-smokers and couples of different types of smokers. We employ matching te...

Gender Differences in Sickness Absence and the Gender Division of Family Responsibilities This study investigates possible reasons for the gender difference in sickness absence. We estimate both shortand long-term effects of parenthood in a within-couple analysis based on the timing of parenthood. We find that after entering parenthood, women increase their sickness absence by between 0.5 days ...

This paper analyses price elasticities in the Austrian market for mobile telecommunications services using data on firm specific tariffs in the period between January 1998 and March 2002. Dynamic panel data regressions are used to estimate short-run and long-run demand elasticities for business customers and for private consumers with both postpaid contracts and prepaid cards. We find that busi...

The productivity e¤ect of public infrastructure investment is controversial in the traditional literature using aggregate production function estimation, mainly due to reverse causality. This paper develops a new approach, using a model of endogenous productivity in a …rm-level production function, and matching Chinese …rm-level production data with province-level infrastructure data. The estim...