abstractgiven the importance of the notion of efficiency in the country's economic growth, measuring the efficiency and the technology gap for various industries in order to achieve the best possible resource assignment, following the declared policy goals, is of particular importance for those countries, such as iran, which are now at the early stages of the industrialization process. hen...

document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. * I would like to thank Peter Schmidt and Bob Myers for their suggestions and guidance. Thanks also go to Thomas Jayne for generously providing me the data, Zhiying Xu, and especially Margaret Beaver for helping me understand the data. All remaining errors and omissions are my own.

Previous studies of the so-called frontier production function have not utilized an adequate characterization of the disturbance term for such a model. In this paper we provide an appropriate specification, by defining the disturbance term as the sum of symmetric normal and (negative) half-normal random variables. Various aspects of maximum-likelihood estimation for the coefficients of a produc...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the levels of technical efficiency in agricultural sector of MENA countries by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) approaches in 2007-2008. The results show that the total average of technical efficiency is as follows: DEABCC(0.770)>DEACCR(0.744)>SFA(0.479), and among all MENA countries, the best performanc...

This paper contributes to the discussion about the performance and e¢ ciency of Portuguese secondary schools, using the stochastic production frontier analysis. We discuss the impact of school variables and the environment on output (measured by the average national examination scores), as determinants of the shape of technology and degree of e¢ ciency. We …nd, in particular, that teacher senio...

Electricity distribution network is a prime example of a natural local monopoly. In many countries, electricity distribution firms are regulated by the government. In Finland, the regulator estimates the efficient cost frontier using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) methods. This paper reports the main results of the research project commissioned by the...

The literature on the measurement of regional convergence at different spatial scales and over different time periods is extensive. This study explores the potential role of variations in European regional technical efficiency as a contributing factor in providing explanation for convergence or divergence. To control for spatial dependence among regions, the paper uses a spatial stochastic fron...

In this paper, we test for productivity gains resulting from the introduction of a productivity-based incentive program in a large manufacturing plant of a Fortune 500 corporation. We develop a methodology based on a stochastic nonparametric frontier estimation technique to evaluate productivity in the postincentive plan period relative to the pre-incentive plan period. We also test for product...

This paper examines the robustness of efficiency score rankings across four distributional assumptions for trans-log stochastic production-frontier models, using data from 1,221 Japanese water utilities (for 2004 and 2005). One-sided error terms considered include the half-normal, truncated normal, exponential, and gamma distributions. Results are compared for homoscedastic and doubly heterosce...

Stochastic nonparametric envelopment of data (StoNED) combines the virtues of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) into a unified framework of frontier estimation. StoNED melds the nonparametric piece-wise linear DEA-type frontier with stochastic SFA-type inefficiency and noise terms. We show that the StoNED model can be estimated in the panel data setting in a...