Search results for " stochastic frontier"
showing 10 items of 12 documents
Climate variability, innovation and firm performance: evidence from the European agricultural sector
2021
Abstract It is generally accepted that adaptation to climate variability requires a technological advancement strategy. However, the innovation process has received little explicit consideration in this framework. We employ a panel endogenous switching regression model to explore whether and to what extent climate variability affects firm performance through the ability to induce the development of adaptation innovations in key resource-based sectors in Europe during the period 2007–2017. Our findings confirm that the knowledge generation process at the heart of climate change adaptation technologies enhances firm performance, especially for firms in the aquaculture and fishing sub-sectors …
Local vs. National Environmental Spending: A Stochastic Frontier Analysis
2012
This work studies the impact of public environmental spending in a fiscal federalist framework. The main question is studying when the centralization of this public economic function is welfare improving. Applying the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA) on Italian, Portuguese and Slovakian data, the paper tries to test this issue. Our results highlight the superiority of centralized environmental spending with respect to the decentralization of this particular public good.
Climate variability and agricultural production efficiency: evidence from Ethiopian farmers
2020
It is known that climate and weather variability have negative impacts on agricultural production efficiency. The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of climatic variables on farms’ efficiency in Ethiopia making use of nationally representative datasets from Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) 2011/2012. By using the Stochastic Frontier Approach, we estimate simultaneously the farmers’ optimal production function and technical inefficiency equations, taking into account unobserved heterogeneity of farmers. Our main findings show that climate change variables have a positive effect on households’ efficiency but the impact depends on the diff…
How does public spending affect technical efficiency? Some evidence from 15 European countries
2020
The relationship between government size and economic growth has been widely debated. Revisiting the subject from a distinct angle with respect to the mainstream approach, we provide an empirical analysis of the impact of government size on technical efficiency. The aim of this paper is to estimate the impact of public sector's size and of public expenditure components on 15 European countries’ technical efficiency from 1996 to 2014 by using a True Random Effect model. Using the total public expenditure as a proxy for the government size we estimate simultaneously national optimal production function and technical efficiency by controlling for income distribution and institutional quality. …
Innovation for climate change adaptation and technical efficiency: an empirical analysis in the European agricultural sector
2020
This paper analyses the effect of innovation on firms' technical efficiency. Using climate-related patent data to proxy for innovation activity in different technological fields, the paper employs a stochastic frontier approach to estimate the impact of innovative efforts on agricultural firms' technical efficiency taking account of both unobservable heterogeneity and double heteroscedasticity in the inefficiency and idiosyncratic terms. Our findings confirm that innovation has a positive impact on firms' productivity (technical efficiency). While agricultural firms located in Germany and Sweden are more efficient compared to those in southern countries, all the European countries considere…
Climate variability and agriculture in Italy: a stochastic frontier analysis at the regional level
2020
In the next future, climate change effects will represent a challenge for Europe and the Mediterranean area. These will have to cope with a rapid increase in climate variability. Although many economic sectors may be affected, agriculture is the most susceptible as climate heavily affects crop production trends, yield variability and the availability of areas suitable for cultivation. Using the stochastic frontier approach, the aim of this work is to analyse the impacts of climate variability on Italian regional technical efficiency in the agricultural sector for a period spanning from 2000 to 2009. Considering that technical inefficiency could be influenced by two main annual meteorologica…
Smart Cities and a Stochastic Frontier Analysis: A Comparison among European Cities
2013
The level of interest in smart cities is growing, and the recent literature on this topic (Holland, 2008; Caragliu et al., 2009, Nijkamp et al., 2011 and Lombardi et al., 2012) identifies a number of factors that characterise a city as smart, such as economic development, environment, human capital, culture and leisure, and e-governance. Thus, the smartness concept is strictly linked to urban efficiency in a multifaceted way. A seminal research for European policy conducted by Giffinger et al. (2007) defines a smart city on the basis of several intangible indicators, such as a smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart living, and smart governance. These authors’ …
Measuring water-use in response to climate change: an analysis of the efficiency of Italian crop production system
2017
Official meteo-climatic statistics show the variability of weather conditions. Their effects on socioeconomic and natural environments should be analyzed in multi-dimensional studies. Among sectors, agriculture is expected to be the most sensitive as well as water resources availability. The aim of our analysis is to measure the performance of Italian regions in crop production by estimating both production technology - including a measure of irrigation water used as input - output elasticities and returns to scale and productive efficiency or technical efficiency where rainfalls and temperatures are proxies of CC conditions in the period 2000-2010 at Italian regional level, using the stoch…
Pollution and economic growth: a maximum likelihood estimation of environmental Kuznets curve
2011
As in Brock and Taylor (2011) in this paper we consider the importance of the relationship between the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) Literature and the Economic Growth Theories. To address this issue we construct country production functions that directly incorporate CO2 emissions as input and estimate them using Stochastic Frontiers. This approach differs from that of Brock and Taylor (2011) but is similar to the one followed by Koop (1998). By introducing the environmental “bads” directly in the production function, we can analyse their contribution to total output growth. We highlight an important contribution of CO2 emissions to growth and find out that the EKC seems not to hold, at…
Production and Efficiency in 21 Industrialized Countries from 1966 to 2007 to Analyse the Italy’s Decline: Application of a Stochastic Frontier Model…
2008
This paper uses a stochastic frontier production model to estimate the technical efficiency of 21 nations among the more industrialized countries in the world for the wide period from 1966 to 2007. A Cobb-Douglas with labour and capital as inputs, GDP as output and efficiency with exponential distribution appears to work good from a statistical point of view. This model is used to estimate in a bayesian approach the efficiency score of these 21 countries. The bayesian way, applied via Gibbs sampling, is here useful to avoid problems about the small number of observations. So, each efficiency score is obtained as mean of 10,000 draws. The results underline a general and progressive efficienc…