Trends in Real Estate Research, 1988–2001: What's Hot and What's Not

This paper examines publications and citations for topic and technique trends in JREFE and REE during the period 1988–2001. Publication and citation patterns reveal real estate as a largely empirical field. The mix of topics and techniques published by the two journals as well as sources cited and garnering citations are converging over time. Within topic or technique categories, the most frequently cited papers or authors tend to garner citations that vary with the relative popularity of the category in the broader literature. Yet, the impacts of top contributors reflect significant contributions outside their most cited research in one specialized one topic area or technique.     

Measures in DEA with an Application to the Malmquist Index

This paper shows the importance of goal vectors G in measuring and dealing with DEA inefficiencies. It emphasizes the advantages of the family of additive relative to the traditional oriented DEA models and shifts the primary emphasis to measuring inefficiency rather than efficiency. This new (raw) inefficiency measure RIN incorporates both the traditional DEA efficiency and the DEA slacks and provides the background for a new approach to the Malmquist Index. The final section points out some deficiencies in existing computational procedures for selecting G and calls for continued research on the selection process, as well as showing a role for G in returns to scale studies.     

International rankings of government performance and source credibility for citizens: experiments about e-government rankings in the UK and the Netherlands

International organizations are an alternative to national governments as a source of information for citizens about governments’ performance. Experiments about high UK e-government performance reported in an international ranking find a United Nations (UN) source increases citizens’ perceptions of the truthfulness of reported performance and increases perceived high performance compared to national government reporting identical information. The UN source also has higher perceived honesty, helpfulness and knowledgeability. A replication experiment in the Netherlands generalizes the finding about perceived higher truthfulness. International sources boost the credibility of information about high performance, improving citizens’ perceptions of national governments.     

Dynamic Inefficiency and Spatial Spillovers in Dutch Dairy Farming

This article examines the presence of spatial spillovers in farms’ dynamic technical inefficiency scores using Data Envelopment Analysis and a second-stage spatial truncated bootstrap regression model. Dynamic inefficiency is measured in terms of variable input contraction and gross investment expansion, while the second-stage model allows an individual’s dynamic inefficiency to be influenced by both own and neighbours’ characteristics. The empirical application focuses on the panel data of specialised Dutch dairy farms observed over the period 2009–2016 and for which exact geographical coordinates of latitude and longitude are available. The results confirm the existence of spatial spillovers in farmers’ dynamic technical inefficiency levels. Although changes in neighbours’ subsidies do not significantly influence an individual’s inefficiency, an increase in neighbours’ age reduces an individual’s performance, while an increase in neighbours’ levels of intensification improves an individual’s dynamic efficiency.     

How do business schools compete in Latin America? Stability and best predictors of success for the AmericaEconomia MBA Ranking

ABSTRACT

The main aim of this paper is to present a longitudinal analysis of the AmericaEconomia MBA Ranking for the period 2005–2014. AmericaEconomia was the first international ranking specifically devoted to Latin American business schools, and with data gathered from this publication, we build a panel to study its stability and the main determinants of a school‘s position in such ranking. We examine the reliability of the ranking, that is whether changes in the relative positions are not just due to white noise, and compare its stability with those of the US and other global rankings. We also empirically determine which are the key quality variables this ranking is promoting for Latin America Business Schools and the evolution of these business schools during the period under study. Unlike previous literature that usually considers dynamic Tobit models for ranking analysis, we put forwards an alternative methodology based on a system GMM estimator with first-differenced instruments. We argue that dynamic Tobit models are appropriate only if you have truncated data about the ranking variable but full data on Business Schools variables.     

The measurement of environmental economic inefficiency with pollution-generating technologies

This study introduces the measurement of environmental inefficiency from an economic perspective. We develop our proposal using the latest by-production models that consider two separate and parallel technologies: a standard technology generating good outputs, and a polluting technology for the by-production of bad outputs. While research into environmental inefficiency incorporating undesirable or bad outputs from a technological perspective is well established, no significant attempts have been made to extend it to the economic sphere. Based on the definition of net profits, we develop an economic inefficiency measure that accounts for suboptimal behavior in the form of foregone private revenue and environmental cost excess. We show that economic inefficiency can be consistently decomposed according to technical and allocative criteria, considering the two separate technologies and market prices, respectively. We illustrate the empirical implementation of our approach using a dataset on agriculture at the level of US states.     

Research on the use of financial statement information for forecasting profitability

Research on the use of financial statement information for forecasting profitability has two objectives: (i) to generate improved forecasts of profitability and accurate estimates of firm value; and (ii) to identify market inefficiencies with respect to financial statement information. For these areas of research, this article describes the evolution, provides examples and shares implications of the research. It also discusses opportunities for future research. The article highlights that financial statement analysis research has slowly evolved and has received limited attention from academics. The article argues that there are vast opportunities for impactful research on fundamental analysis and market inefficiencies.     

Is there a relation between labor investment inefficiency and corporate tax avoidance?

This paper investigates the relation between labor investment inefficiency and corporate tax avoidance. Employing a large sample of 61,542 U.S. firm-year observations over the 1962–2014 period, our regression results show that labor investment inefficiency is significantly positively related to tax avoidance. More specifically, we find that a one standard deviation of labor investment inefficiency leads to a 0.71% reduction in the accounting effective tax rate. Our findings are robust to endogeneity concerns, alternative proxy measures of tax avoidance and labor investment efficiency, and additional control variables pertaining to accounting quality and managerial ability. Taken together, our regression results show that labor investment inefficiency is an important determinant of corporate tax avoidance.     

Determinants of international university rankings scores

This article analyses the relationship between a university’s score in international university rankings, its expenditure per student and other factors such as university mission, size and productive inefficiency. We develop an economic model of rankings and universities and estimate this model with data on universities classified in the top 200 by the Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of 2007. We find that the elasticity of a university’s ranking score for the expenditure per student is between 4% and 9%, and that there are no clear signs of inefficiency in production among the top 200 universities. University mission and size are also significant predictors of ranking score. These results are especially interesting given the relevance attributed to rankings by government officials, university directors and students.     

The transient and persistent efficiency of Italian and German universities: a stochastic frontier analysis

Despite measures on the European level to increase the compatibility between the higher education sectors, the recent literature exposes variations in their efficiencies. To gain insights into these differences, we split the efficiency term according to the two management levels each university is confronted with. We separate short-term and long-term efficiency while controlling for unobserved institution-specific heterogeneity. We argue that the first term reflects the efficiency of the individual universities working within the country, while the second term echoes the influence of the overall country-specific higher education structure. The cross-country comparison displays whether efficiency differences between countries are related to the individual performance of their universities or their higher education structure. This allows more purposeful policy recommendations and expands the literature regarding the efficiency of universities in a fundamental way. Choosing Italy and Germany as two important illustrative examples, we show that the Italian higher education sector exhibits a higher overall efficiency value. With the individual universities working at the upper bound of efficiency in both countries, the remaining inefficiency and the gap between the countries are caused by persistent, structural inefficiency. Future measures should hence aim at the country-specific structure and not solely at the activities of single universities.