Modeling CRS bounded additive DEA models and characterizing their Pareto-efficient points

Dealing with weighted additive models in Data Envelopment Analysis guarantees that any projection of an inefficient unit belongs to the strong efficient frontier, among other interesting properties. Recently, constant returns to scale (CRS) range-bounded models have been introduced for defining a new additive-type efficiency measure (see Cooper et al. in J Prod Anal 35(2):85–94, 2011). This paper continues such earlier work further, considering a more general setting. In particular, we show that under free disposability of inputs and outputs, CRS bounded additive models require a double set of slacks. The second set of slacks allows us to properly characterize all the Pareto-efficient points associated to the bounded technology. We further introduce the CRS partially-bounded additive models.     

Assessing the effect of educational programs on public schools’ performance

This paper provides evidence on the effectiveness in the implementation of an educational program which offered public schools in Catalonia (Spain) the opportunity to improve the quality of educational provision. We employ a difference-in-differences approach on rich balanced panel data of public schools. The results confirm that the program did effectively improve students’ achievement and reduce absenteeism, albeit not for all modules and school types or across all years. Our results highlight that it is important to condition the delivery of resources upon specific academic goals depending on the characteristics of the treated population. Additionally, program results suggest the need to enhance educational program design in order to get better evaluation feedback.

Abbreviations: DoE: Department of Education; EU: European Union; PMQCE: Projecte per a la Millora de la Qualitat dels Centres Educatius; DiD: Differences-in-Differences; SFDC: Schools Facing Disadvantaged Conditions; OECD: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development; REA: Regional Educational Authority     

Overconfidence and Market Efficiency with Heterogeneous Agents

We study financial markets in which both rational and overconfident agents coexist and make endogenous information acquisition decisions. We demonstrate the following irrelevance result when a positive fraction of rational agents (endogenously) decides to become informed in equilibrium, prices are set as if all investors were rational, and as a consequence the overconfidence bias does not affect informational efficiency, price volatility, rational traders’ expected profits or their welfare. Intuitively, as overconfidence goes up, so does price informativeness, which makes rational agents cut their information acquisition activities, effectively undoing the standard effect of more aggressive trading by the overconfident. The main intuition of the paper, if not the irrelevance result, is shown to be robust to different model specifications.We would like to thank Alberto Bisin, Xavier Freixas, Ken French, Moshe Kim, Jose Marín, and Terrance Odean for comments on an early draft, as well as an anonymous referee and seminar participants at HEC Geneva, the 2004 EFA meetings, the 2004 European Econometric Society meetings and the 2005 SAET conference. Diego García and Branko Urošević gratefully acknowledge financial support by SECCF (Belgrade).     

Misallocation and productivity

A large portion of differences in output per capita across countries is explained by differences in total factor productivity (TFP). In this article, we summarize a recent literature — and the articles in this special issue on misallocation and productivity — that focus on the reallocation of factors across heterogeneous production units as an important source of measured TFP differences across countries.