- Applied econometrician whose research focuses currently on productivity/efficiency and panel dataedit
This paper aims to investigate spillover effects of public capital stock in a production function model that accounts for spatial dependencies. Although there are a number of studies that estimate the output elasticity of public capital... more
This paper aims to investigate spillover effects of public capital stock in a production function model that accounts for spatial dependencies. Although there are a number of studies that estimate the output elasticity of public capital stock, they suffer from a failure to refine the output elasticity of public capital stock as well as to account for spillover effects of the public capital stock on the production efficiency when such spatial dependencies exist. For this purpose we employ a spatial autoregressive stochastic frontier model and analyze estimates with a time-varying spatial weights matrix. Using data for 21 OECD countries from 1960 to 2001, we found that spillover effects can be an important factor explaining variations in technical inefficiency across countries as well as discrepancies among various levels of output elasticity of public capital stock in traditional production function approaches.
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In this chapter we use micro economic models of individual behavior in a dynamic context to describe how an individual chooses the optimal level of investment in healthiness and implicitly length of life. This establishes a foundation for... more
In this chapter we use micro economic models of individual behavior in a dynamic context to describe how an individual chooses the optimal level of investment in healthiness and implicitly length of life. This establishes a foundation for the estimation of structural parameters related to health demands for older adult men in Section 2.4 and for the hazard mortality estimates that we present in Chapters 4 and 5. While choice regarding health may be considered commonplace for economists, characterizing the length of life as a choice may seem crude and unreasonable to some. There are, however, numerous examples of people making this choice directly, e.g., suicides, living wills that mandate against extraordinary medical care, the refusal by Christian Scientists of potentially life-preserving medical care, and the shortfall of deaths before personally significant dates with a subsequent spike in death rates afterwards.4 Moreover, people have cut back on cigarette smoking since the Surgeon General’s 1964 report on the morbidity and mortality implications of smoking. They also have to be paid more to work at jobs at which more deaths occur (see Thaler and Rosen, 1975). More to the point, by constantly making choices that affect their health and thus the probability that their health falls irreversibly below some threshold leading to death, individuals constantly are affecting their expected duration of survival — whether or not they characterize these choices as proximate causes of survival.
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Our paper provides new methods to robustify productivity growth measurement by utilizing various economic theories explaining economic growth and productivity and the econometric model generated by that particular theory. We utilize the... more
Our paper provides new methods to robustify productivity growth measurement by utilizing various economic theories explaining economic growth and productivity and the econometric model generated by that particular theory. We utilize the World Productivity Database from the UNIDO to analyze productivity during the period 1960-2010 for OECD countries. We focus on three competing models from the stochastic frontier literature, Cornwell, Schmidt, and Sickles (1990), Kumbhakar (1990) and Battese and Coelli (1992) to estimate productivity growth and its decomposition into technical change and efficiency change and utilize methods due to Hansen (2010) to construct optimal weights in order to model average the results from these three approaches.
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On the basis of the previous success of productivity workshops in 2007 at Tsinghua University and in 2008 at Zhejiang University, and in cooperation with the Chinese Economic Association (Europe), the 2012 International Workshop on... more
On the basis of the previous success of productivity workshops in 2007 at Tsinghua University and in 2008 at Zhejiang University, and in cooperation with the Chinese Economic Association (Europe), the 2012 International Workshop on Chinese Productivity was sponsored by the School for Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University. The Workshop provided another opportunity for academic researchers to communicate their research results and to discuss important issues in the field of applied productivity analysis in general and specific issues concerning China in particular. This special issue is one of the outcomes from the workshop. The first paper by Sickles, Hao, and Shang provides a brief survey and addresses generic methodological issues in regard to identifying and estimating the two major components of aggregate productivity growth: technical change and efficiency change (catch-up). The paper compares the productivity performance of Asian economies. Färe et al. present a model on environmental efficiency using Swedish data and discuss the potential for applications in the Chinese situation. In the third paper, Han and coauthors study the performance of Chinese commercial banks from aspects of social productive efficiency, service efficiency, profit efficiency and growth efficiency. The last paper by Jensen and Schøtt put innovation performance by a firm in social contexts, studying the difference between China and the rest of the world in terms of networking and innovation and the relationship between the two. The collection of the papers in the special issue reflect the growing interests in recent years in the comparison of productivity performance across economies with different institutional set-ups, increasing concerns of environmental issues in the fast growing Chinese economy and a gradual awareness of innovation and productivity performance in relation to social and historical factors. Therefore, current productivity studies require far more sophisticated frameworks and involve a wide range of cutting edge methodologies such as techniques of frontier analysis, dynamic models of innovation determinants and institutional analysis of national innovation systems. We believe as more resources are attracted into the area of Chinese productivity studies more fruitful results can be expected in the near future. As our work has benefited from many individuals and institutions, we would like to take this opportunity to mention just a few. Since 2007, Professor Angang Hu of Tsinghua University has been a main driving force behind the three workshops on Chinese productivity. It would not have been possible for us to achieve what has been
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Research Interests: Mathematics, Computer Science, Econometrics, Statistics, Gastroenterology, and 14 moreInference, Medicine, Biopsy, Test, Internal Medicine, Statistical Inference, Hypoglycemia, Liver Transplantation, Fibrosis, Household Survey, Receiver Operating Characteristic, Hypertriglyceridemia, Lactic acidosis, and Liver biopsy
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This chapter provides a wide-ranging interdisciplinary overview of productivity analysis, which also serves to introduce the chapters in the Handbook. It begins with an exploration into the significance of productivity growth, for... more
This chapter provides a wide-ranging interdisciplinary overview of productivity analysis, which also serves to introduce the chapters in the Handbook. It begins with an exploration into the significance of productivity growth, for business, for the economy, and for social economic progress. The chapter continues with a treatment of how productivity is defined, measured, and implemented. It then addresses two important empirical issues. The first involves productivity dispersion, and the productivity dynamics that would either lead to a reallocation of resources that would reduce dispersion and increase aggregate productivity, or allow dispersion to persist behind barriers to productivity-enhancing reallocation. The second involves a search for the drivers of (or impediments to) productivity growth, some of which are organizational in nature and under management control, and others of which are institutional in nature and beyond management control but subject to public policy interve...
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This paper proposes a general model that combines the Mixture Hazard Model with the Stochastic Frontier Model for the purposes of investigating the main determinants of the failures and performances of a panel of U.S. commercial banks... more
This paper proposes a general model that combines the Mixture Hazard Model with the Stochastic Frontier Model for the purposes of investigating the main determinants of the failures and performances of a panel of U.S. commercial banks during the financial crisis that began in 2007. The combined model provides measures of the probability and time to failure conditional on a bank’s performance and vice versa. Both continuous-time and discrete-time specifications of the model are considered in the paper. The estimation is carried out via the expectation-maximization algorithm due to incomplete information regarding the identity of at-risk banks. In- and out-of-sample predictive accuracy of the proposed models is investigated in order to assess their potential to serve as early warning tools.
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We estimate the determinants of income inequality focusing on the U.S. over 1985—2013. We decompose widely used inequality indices by subgroups, income sources, and factor components based on regression approaches to discover the... more
We estimate the determinants of income inequality focusing on the U.S. over 1985—2013. We decompose widely used inequality indices by subgroups, income sources, and factor components based on regression approaches to discover the significant sources of widening inequality in the United States. Our results indicate that education, marriage, gender, race, asset income, as well as employment in manufacturing and financial industries all expand the gap across different income classes.
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The paper proposes a novel two-step approach that evaluates countries’ innovation efficiency and their responsiveness to expansions in their innovation inputs, while addressing shortcomings associated with composite indicators. Based on... more
The paper proposes a novel two-step approach that evaluates countries’ innovation efficiency and their responsiveness to expansions in their innovation inputs, while addressing shortcomings associated with composite indicators. Based on our evaluations, we propose innovation policies tailored to take into account the diverse economic environments of the many countries in our study. Applying multidirectional efficiency analysis on data from the Global Innovation Index, we obtain separate efficiency scores for each innovation input and output. We then estimate different sensitivities for each country, by applying partial least squares on explanatory and response matrices which are determined by the nearest neighbours of the country under consideration. The findings reveal substantial asymmetries with respect to innovation efficiencies and sensitivities, which is indicative of the diversity of national innovation systems. Considering these two dimensions in combination, we outline th...
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This paper develops an econometric model for predicting aircraft demand by the major world airlines. This model is based on economic theory where firm behavior is assumed to rest on cost minimization and profit maximization. Demand for... more
This paper develops an econometric model for predicting aircraft demand by the major world airlines. This model is based on economic theory where firm behavior is assumed to rest on cost minimization and profit maximization. Demand for factors of production, here aircraft, emanate from such behavioral underpinnings. In contrast, the authors also forecast aircraft demand based on time series methods. These methods are theoretical in nature and postulate that demand is based on past values and disturbance terms.
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According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in the two decades preceding 2014 two member countries, Italy and Spain, experienced productivity decline, while just four member countries, Korea, Ireland,... more
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in the two decades preceding 2014 two member countries, Italy and Spain, experienced productivity decline, while just four member countries, Korea, Ireland, Finland, and the United States, managed to achieve rates of productivity growth in excess of one percent per annum. Rates of productivity growth slowed following the global financial crisis in nearly all member countries. These diverse national productivity performances are aggregates of the productivity performances of individual producers, which are influenced by organizational factors such as the quality of management practices and the adoption of new technologies, and also by institutional features such as the stringency of product and labor market and environmental regulations. At the level of the individual producer, productivity has an important impact on financial performance and survival, while at the aggregate level, productivity is a criti...
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This study explores the spatial effects in nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) pollution and drinking water production patterns in agriculture. Two important examples are that water utilities that deliver and treat drinking water in... more
This study explores the spatial effects in nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) pollution and drinking water production patterns in agriculture. Two important examples are that water utilities that deliver and treat drinking water in agricultural areas have to deal with excess nitrogen and phosphorus released to the environment by crop and livestock operations, an externality created by the agricultural sector; and, second, that the drinking water production sector in rural areas is a highly fragmented with a multitude of enterprise sizes, organization forms and network densities that have spatial components. In our analysis we present measures of N and P pollution. We employ information collected in section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act: count of impaired water bodies by N/P, and count of point source N/P pollution at the Hydrologic Unit Code 8 (HUC) or sub-basin level and estimate how these variables affect drinking water utilities scale economies, productive efficiency, and scale and scope economies.
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Research Interests: Business and Productivity
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Research Interests: Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, Econometrics, Productivity, and 10 moreData Envelopment Analysis, Panel Data, Bootstrapping, Modelling and simulation, Stochastic Frontier Analysis, Technical Efficiency of crop production, Econometric analysis, Statistics and Probability, nonparametric analysis, and Index Numbers
Research Interests: Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, Econometrics, Productivity, and 10 moreData Envelopment Analysis, Panel Data, Bootstrapping, Modelling and simulation, Stochastic Frontier Analysis, Technical Efficiency of crop production, Econometric analysis, Statistics and Probability, nonparametric analysis, and Index Numbers
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In this chapter we use micro economic models of individual behavior in a dynamic context to describe how an individual chooses the optimal level of investment in healthiness and implicitly length of life. This establishes a foundation for... more
In this chapter we use micro economic models of individual behavior in a dynamic context to describe how an individual chooses the optimal level of investment in healthiness and implicitly length of life. This establishes a foundation for the estimation of structural parameters related to health demands for older adult men in Section 2.4 and for the hazard mortality estimates that we present in Chapters 4 and 5. While choice regarding health may be considered commonplace for economists, characterizing the length of life as a choice may seem crude and unreasonable to some. There are, however, numerous examples of people making this choice directly, e.g., suicides, living wills that mandate against extraordinary medical care, the refusal by Christian Scientists of potentially life-preserving medical care, and the shortfall of deaths before personally significant dates with a subsequent spike in death rates afterwards.4 Moreover, people have cut back on cigarette smoking since the Surgeon General’s 1964 report on the morbidity and mortality implications of smoking. They also have to be paid more to work at jobs at which more deaths occur (see Thaler and Rosen, 1975). More to the point, by constantly making choices that affect their health and thus the probability that their health falls irreversibly below some threshold leading to death, individuals constantly are affecting their expected duration of survival — whether or not they characterize these choices as proximate causes of survival.
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Our paper provides new methods to robustify productivity growth measurement by utilizing various economic theories explaining economic growth and productivity and the econometric model generated by that particular theory. We utilize the... more
Our paper provides new methods to robustify productivity growth measurement by utilizing various economic theories explaining economic growth and productivity and the econometric model generated by that particular theory. We utilize the World Productivity Database from the UNIDO to analyze productivity during the period 1960-2010 for OECD countries. We focus on three competing models from the stochastic frontier literature, Cornwell, Schmidt, and Sickles (1990), Kumbhakar (1990) and Battese and Coelli (1992) to estimate productivity growth and its decomposition into technical change and efficiency change and utilize methods due to Hansen (2010) to construct optimal weights in order to model average the results from these three approaches.
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Research Interests: Mathematics, Economics, Econometrics, Nonparametric Methods, Nonparametric Statistics, and 15 moreMonte Carlo Simulation, Productivity, Panel Data, Random Effects Model, Stochastic Frontier, Productivity and Efficiency Measurement, Estimator, Parametric Statistics, Semiparametric Regression, C, Fixed Effects, LINEAR PROGRAM, Panel Estimation, Random effects, and Efficiency Measurement
Research Interests: Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, Econometrics, Productivity, and 10 moreData Envelopment Analysis, Panel Data, Bootstrapping, Modelling and simulation, Stochastic Frontier Analysis, Technical Efficiency of crop production, Econometric analysis, Statistics and Probability, nonparametric analysis, and Index Numbers
ABSTRACT The paper studies consensus estimates of Asian productivity growth from 1980 to 2000. We outline methods that have been proposed to measure productivity growth and its two main factors, innovation and catch-up. We show how such... more
ABSTRACT The paper studies consensus estimates of Asian productivity growth from 1980 to 2000. We outline methods that have been proposed to measure productivity growth and its two main factors, innovation and catch-up. We show how such methods have particular canonical representations that seamlessly transfer to the panel data literature and discuss a number of competing specifications introduced into the productivity literature. We then point out how such models can be combined to provide consensus model average estimates of innovation and catch-up, utilizing results from recent work by Hao on world productivity growth. We utilize data from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization to examine productivity trends and its decomposition for a number of different groupings of Asian countries.
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