In this study we analyze the evolution of operating cost inefficiency for the English and Welsh water industry over the period 1995-2001 by estimating an heteroskedastic stochastic variable cost frontier. The main aim of this paper is to provide an overall picture of the industry cost inefficiency, as we consider both the water and sewerage companies and the smaller water only companies. The ma...

This paper explores the e ects of rainwater harvesting (RWH) on aggregate household labor supply in areas prone to droughts. Using a Brazilian survey on rainwater harvesting, we nd that having a RWH infrastructure at the homestead increases household wellbeing through three channels: (i) a direct time allocation e ect since households spend less time fetching water from distant sources, the tim...

In this paper we investigate natural gas producer’s reactions to changes in market prices. We estimate price elasticities of aggregated supply in the most competitive market for natural gas: the United States. Using monthly time series data form 1987 to 2012 our analysis is based on an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bound Cointegration approach to obtain short and long-run elasticities o...

This study presents an empirical analysis of the cost efficiency of a sample of Swiss multi-utilities operating in the distribution of electricity, natural gas and water. The multi-utilities that operate in different sectors are characterized by a strong unobserved heterogeneity. Therefore the measurement of their performance poses an important challenge for the regulators. The purpose of this ...

This paper provides an empirical demonstration for a practical approach of efficiency evaluation against the background of limited data availability in some regulated industries. Here, traditional DEA may result in a lack of discriminatory power when high numbers of variables but only limited observations are available. We apply PCADEA for radial efficiency measurement to US natural gas transmi...

The influence of solid-liquid demixing, liquid-liquid demixing and vitrification on the morphology of polylactide membranes has been investigated. To study the effects of crystallization of polylactides on the membrane formation and morphology, polylactides of varying stereoregularity were used. The polymers applied were poly-L-lactide (PLLA) and copolymers with different molar ratios of L-lact...

BACKGROUND The objective of the research work is to assess day time traffic noise level at curbside open-air microenvironment of Kolkata city, India under heterogeneous environmental conditions. RESULTS Prevailing traffic noise level in terms of A-weighted equivalent noise level (Leq) at the microenvironment was in excess of 12.6 ± 2.1 dB(A) from the day time standard of 65 dB(A) for commerci...

We present the results of numerical calculations of the channelling and undulator radiation generated by an ultra-relativistic positron channelling along a crystal plane, which is periodically bent. The bending might be due either to the propagation of a transverse acoustic wave through the crystal, or due to the static strain as it occurs in superlattices. The periodically bent crystal serves ...