According to a frequently cited finding by Berger et al (1993), X-inefficiency contributes 20% to cost-inefficiency in western banks. Empirical studies of Chinese banks tend to place cost-inefficiency in the region of 50%. Such estimates would suggest that Chinese banks suffer from gross cost inefficiency. Using a nonparametric bootstrapping method, this study decomposes cost-inefficiency in Ch...

This study demarcates cost-inefficiency in Chinese banks into X-inefficiency and rent-seeking-inefficiency. A protected banking market not only encourages weak management and X-inefficiency but also public ownership and state directed lending encourages moral hazard and bureaucratic rent seeking. This paper uses bootstrap non-parametric techniques to estimate measures of X-inefficiency and rent...

Two very different articles in this issue deal with the same important subject: workflow redesign. It’s a topic that is at the same time important and often slighted, largely because workflow – the way we do what we do day after day – tends to become such a well-traveled route that we may forget that other ways may lead us to the same end more quickly and efficiently. When workflow issues do ...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure, and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) on a multifaceted administrative German dataset combined with the balanc...