On aggregation of multi-factor productivity indexes

Journal of Productivity Analysis - The goal of this paper is to investigate the question of the importance of aggregation of the Paasche and Laspeyres versions of the Malmquist quantity and...     

Transforming industrial relations in Russia: a case of convergence with industrialised market economies?

Here the authors discuss the ‘old unions’, the ‘new unions’ and the still dominant role of the state. They show how contemporary IR includes changes towards arrangements that are more typical of industrialised market economies (IMEs); nevertheless, there are significant continuities with past patterns, and divergences from IMEs’ arrangements.     

Economics,Darwinism, and the Case of Disciplinary Imports

The problem of causality in economics is still contended by various epistemological alternatives. The article builds on the received view of Darwinism in economics and examines the way in which economics and biology find common ground in concepts and assumptions that reflect causal commonalities of the natural and the social world. We claim that the role the contingent pattern plays in understanding socioeconomic change provides reasons to concede corrections to a rule‐based causal mechanism. The article concludes on the merits of advancing the ontological equivalent of interdisciplinary studies as one possible standard in reference to which to judge the epistemic adequacy of any import.     

Testing for (Efficiency) Catching-up

We used advances in data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques to examine efficiency scores and investigate the issue of convergence and divergence in a cross-country analysis. Specifically, we used bootstrapping techniques to examine a data set of 52 developed and developing countries. We found that when using the standard DEA model, some of the results were not robust. Further, we broke the sample into groups to examine club convergence. We found that efficiency scores were significantly different between groups and that there was some evidence of convergence of efficiency scores within each group.     

Researching human resource development: emergence of a critical approach to HRD enquiry

This paper argues that mainstream research in management and human resource development (HRD) is dominated by a positivist paradigm. In a theoretical discussion and review of literature on management, human resource management, HRD and organization studies, it explores critical perspectives in research, which draw on postmodernism and critical theory. It examines how they have contributed to the emergence of a critical HRD and discusses the features of a critical HRD research.     

Pricing Monitoring Uncertainty in Climate Policy

This article assesses the environmental and economic efficiency of three different approaches to treat monitoring uncertainty in climate policy, namely prescribing uncertainty, setting minimum certainty thresholds and pricing uncertainty through a discount. Our model of the behavior of profit-maximizing agents demonstrates that under the simplest set of assumptions the regulator has no interest in reducing monitoring uncertainty. However, in the presence of information asymmetry, monitoring uncertainty may hamper the economic and environmental performance of climate policy due to adverse selection. In a mandatory policy, prescribing a reasonable level of uncertainty is preferable if the regulator has enough information to determine this level. For voluntary mechanisms, such as carbon offsets, allowing agents to set their own monitoring uncertainty below a maximum threshold or discounting carbon revenues in proportion to monitoring uncertainty are the best approaches for the regulator to mitigate the negative effects of information asymmetry. These conclusions are much more pronounced when agents do not accrue revenues from their mitigation action, other than carbon. Our analysis of monitoring uncertainty under information asymmetry, which results in heterogeneity in the agents’ benefits from abatement, generalizes the classical trade-off between production efficiency and information rents.     

European Parliament elections in times of crisis

In May 2014, EU citizens will vote in the most important European Parliament elections to date. With the new powers allocated to it by the Lisbon Treaty, the new European Parliament will shape EU policies in many important areas and will elect the President of the Commission. However, public confi dence in the EU has fallen to historically low levels — to a great extent due to the fi nancial crisis and its aftermath — and the participation rate in European Parliament elections has dropped steadily since the fi rst call for a direct vote in 1979. This raises fundamental questions about its political and democratic legitimacy. This Forum examines the economic agendas of the main political parties vying for power and the potential outcome of the May elections, including the role that radical and anti-euro parties are likely to play in the campaign and in the next Parliament.     

Breaking the curse of dimensionality in nonparametric testing

For tests based on nonparametric methods, power crucially depends on the dimension of the conditioning variables, and specifically decreases with this dimension. This is known as the “curse of dimensionality”. We propose a new general approach to nonparametric testing in high dimensional settings and we show how to implement it when testing for a parametric regression. The resulting test behaves against directional local alternatives almost as if the dimension of the regressors was one. It is also almost optimal against classes of one-dimensional alternatives for a suitable choice of the smoothing parameter. The test performs well in small samples compared to several other tests.     

Nonparametric least squares methods for stochastic frontier models

When analyzing productivity and efficiency of firms, stochastic frontier models are very attractive because they allow, as in typical regression models, to introduce some noise in the Data Generating Process . Most of the approaches so far have been using very restrictive fully parametric specified models, both for the frontier function and for the components of the stochastic terms. Recently, local MLE approaches were introduced to relax these parametric hypotheses. In this work we show that most of the benefits of the local MLE approach can be obtained with less assumptions and involving much easier, faster and numerically more robust computations, by using nonparametric least-squares methods. Our approach can also be viewed as a semi-parametric generalization of the so-called “modified OLS” that was introduced in the parametric setup. If the final evaluation of individual efficiencies requires, as in the local MLE approach, the local specification of the distributions of noise and inefficiencies, it is shown that a lot can be learned on the production process without such specifications. Even elasticities of the mean inefficiency can be analyzed with unspecified noise distribution and a general class of local one-parameter scale family for inefficiencies. This allows to discuss the variation in inefficiency levels with respect to explanatory variables with minimal assumptions on the Data Generating Process.     

Corporate Governance and Firm’s Efficiency: The Case of a Transitional Country, Ukraine

In this study, we look for empirical support for the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between the levels of corporate governance quality across firms and the relative efficiency levels of these firms. This hypothesis is related to Leibenstein’s idea of X-efficiency. We use the data envelopment analysis (DEA) estimator to obtain proxies for X-[in]efficiency of firms in our sample and then analyze them with respect to different ownership structures by comparing distributions and aggregate efficiencies across different groups. We also use truncated regression with bootstrap, following Simar and Wilson Estimation and influence in two stage, semi-parametric models of production process, Simar and Zelenyuk (2003) to infer on relationship of inefficiency to various indicators of quality of corporate governance, ownership variables, as well as industry and year specific dummies. The data is coming from seven industries in Ukraine. “The entrepreneurship structure itself may be critical, with the classic issue of the separation of ownership from control being regarded as one of the earliest and most important sources of X-efficiency” (Button and Weyman-Jones, 1992, American Economic Review). We would like to dedicate this paper to the memory of Christos Panzios—co-editor who handled our paper to almost the very end, whose suggestions and encouragement have helped us substantially improve our paper.