This paper proposes a framework for benchmarking European co-operative banks and the rationalization of their operational activities. The analysis is based on the Luenberger productivity indicator. A key advantage of this method is that it allows for both input contraction and output expansion in determining relative efficiencies and productivity changes. Benchmarks are provided for improving t...

Phenological changes among plants due to climate change are well documented, but often hard to interpret. In order to assess the adaptive value of observed changes, we study how annual plants with and without growth constraints should optimize their flowering time when productivity and season length changes. We consider growth constraints that depend on the plant's vegetative mass: self-shading...

Recent research has shown that biodiversity may has its greatest impact on ecosystem functioning in heterogeneous environments. However, the role of soil heterogeneity as a modulator of ecosystem responses to changes in biodiversity remains poorly understood, as few biodiversity studies have explicitly considered this important ecosystem feature.We conducted a microcosm experiment over two grow...

Data from the 2002 Supermarket Panel are used to estimate a supermarket production function with weekly gross margin as the output measure and store selling area and total labor hours as variable inputs. The model also includes productivity shifters describing format and service offerings, store ownership structure, unionization, and adoption of new information technologies and related business...

A four-parity study is proposed to examine the effects of nutritional manipulation during gilt development on subsequent sow performance. Gilts will be selected from two genetic lines that are highly prolific, but differ in rate and composition of growth. During the development period (45 to 250 lb), gilts will be provided either; i) ad libitum access to feed, or ii) ad libitum access to feed u...

Historically, commercial use of university research has been viewed in terms of spillovers. Recently, there has been a dramatic increase in technology transfer through licensing as universities attempt to appropriate the returns from faculty research. This change has prompted concerns regarding the source of this growth specifically, whether it suggests a change in the nature of university rese...

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), many techniques have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption. Among them, one of the outstanding methods is the transmission power control (TPC). In this paper, we propose a TPC scheme that can be easily implemented in IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The simulation results demonstrated that our TCP scheme is effective in conserving energy and can be used in WS...

We present results from the first exposure of a liquid Ar time projection chamber to a neutrino beam. The data have been collected in 1997 with a 50 liter ICARUS-like chamber located between the CHORUS and NOMAD experiment at the CERN West Area Neutrino Facility. We focus on the analysis of quasi-elastic interactions; despite the limited size of the detector, nuclear effects beyond Fermi motion...

The restructuring of the Chinese electricity sector in 2002 reshaped the market structure by vertically unbundling the dominant integrated firm and started the process of wholesale price liberalization. We estimate factor demands to study whether these reforms boosted productivity in the generation segment of the industry. Controlling explicitly for price-heterogeneity across firms and unobserv...