Another Approach to Data Envelopment Analysis in Noisy Environments: DEA+

In this paper a DEA+ labeled approach for efficiency measurement in the stochastic case is presented along with a consistency proof and some preliminary evidence illustrating the small sample performance. DEA+ can basically handle multi-output technologies like standard DEA but allows to filter noise, that might have disturbed production and unlike a related approach does not require panel data. Consistency of DEA+ relies on the assumption of i.i.d. distributed and bounded noise and requires radial efficiency measurement. First Monte Carlo experiments show that a DEA+ based average inefficiency estimator performs well for samples of size n=100 in one-output, two-input settings compared to the corresponding Stochastic Frontier Estimator. Sensitivity of DEA+ performance with respect to parametrization of noise is weak, but higher noise contribution requires much larger sample size for satisfactory results.     

The Impact of Deregulation during 1990–1997 on Banking in Austria

The operating environment for banking in Austriachanged substantially during 1990–1997. The changes during the periodcan be seen as a gradualadjustment towards adherence to European banking standards, which becamea legal requirement on Austria's entry, in 1995, into the European Union. Inthis paper, we investigate the relative performance of Austrian banksduring this period and thereby test the hypothesis of increasedcompetition. The study reveals that Aktiengesellschaften hadconsistent productivity improvement over the period, Sparkassen,and Volksbanken exhibited a turnaround in productivity in 1997,and Raiffeisenbanken experienced consistent productivity decline.Overall, Austrian banks experienced a decline in average efficiencyand productivity until 1996 with slight improvements in 1997. Thestudy reveals evidence of product diversification rather thanincreased price competition; a decrease in the spread of prices paidfor inputs indicates increased competitiveness over the period, whichcan be attributed to deregulation brought about by EU-membership.     

Joint Adjustment of House Prices, Stock Prices and Output Towards Short‐run Equilibrium

A dynamic IS‐LM model including houses and stocks as additional assets will be analysed in this paper. Providing also housing services, a major consumption item for most households, houses create an additional link between the monetary and the real sector, distinct from the traditional wealth effect channel. We analyse the adjustment path of output, house prices and stock prices after policy shocks within a rational expectation setup. Depending crucially on the elasticity of housing services demand, different reaction patterns of asset prices will emerge. The results are contrasted with relevant empirical findings, particularly Lastrapes (Journal of Housing Economics, 11 (2002), pp. 40–74), leading to the identification of plausible elasticity ranges. The analysis sheds new light on the ongoing discussion about demand effects from changing real estate wealth and about determinants of house price fluctuations.     

Comparing structural efficiency of unbalanced subsamples: A resampling adaptation of data envelopment analysis

This paper investigates the performance of a bootstrapping enhanced DEA to measure the relative structural efficiency of unbalanced subsamples. Although this issue plays an important role in applied DEA, it is often ignored, resulting in misleading conclusions concerning relative efficiency. It is shown, that a reasampling approach to DEA can cope with this problem and also allows the use of pooled samples. The distribution of a statistic to test the hypotheses of equal structural efficiency is derived from Monte Carlo simulations and compared with the corresponding statistic calculated from standard DEA results. While the resampling variant of DEA justifies the use of the normal approximation, this is not the case for standard DEA.     

Restricted immigration in a two-sector economy

This paper will analyze income redistribution and fiscal effects caused by immigration in a two-sector economy, where one sector is closed and where foreign and domestic labor are homogeneous. The setup of this model is guided by the stylized fact that today's immigrants in the European Union are distributed highly unequal across sectors, with a clear concentration in low-income sectors. Unlike many previous studies, we do not interpret this segmentation by means of differential skills because we focus on tomorrow's potential immigrants from former communist countries in northeastern Europe, which exhibit education levels similar to those of western European workers. Contrary to results from one-sector models, some pure wage earners may also win from immigration as a result of changing relative prices. Therefore, the political support for immigration depends not only on the capital ownership distribution, but also on relative immigration sector size and relative sector productivity. Furthermore, the necessary tax rate to finance the transfer system may decrease as a result of immigration. The authors thank the participants of the Forty-Seventh International Atlantic Economic Conference, Vienna, Austria, March 16–23, 1999, in particular, Willi Altzinger, Koen Schoors, and Heinz Hollenstein, for their valuable comments which helped to improve this paper considerably.     

A PROPERTY TAXATION MECHANISM WITH SELF‐ASSESSMENT

This paper analyzes a variant of the classic idea for property taxation based on owner's self‐assessment. To induce reporting of market values tax authorities announce to purchase some of the properties randomly at declared values under certain conditions. These conditions are based on properties of the distribution of declared values. It is proven that a unique Nash equilibrium of this taxation game among tax payers exists in which all of them report market values and tax authorities do not purchase any property.