Search results for " frontier"
showing 10 items of 92 documents
Sicily: frontier-island in the modern Mediterranean
2010
Production of written French skills by first generation immigrants in working age
2013
This paper aims to identify factors explaining the level of proficiency in written French by immigrants in working age, knowing that few research has been conducted in France on this issue. The originality of this paper is the stochastic production frontier model to explain the scores in written French and the productive performance of immigrants (considered as producers of their own skills). The main results show that mother tongue, age at immigration, social life and mother's diploma are elements which influence the effectiveness of this production. They play a crucial role in the ability of immigrants to use effectively their duration of stay in France and their length of education, cons…
Soft Computing Techniques for Portfolio Selection: Combining SRI with Mean-Variance Goals
2014
A fuzzy portfolio selection model is presented incorporating a socially responsible goal without discarding a priori financially good portfolios or weakening a priori the financial goals. Hence, the optimal portfolios it provides could be either efficient from the strictly financial point of view or non-efficient if leaving the efficient frontier substantially improves the degree of social responsibility. The model can be used to direct heuristic procedures in order to select a reduced number of various alternatives from which the investor can directly make a final decision.
Calibration of optimal execution of financial transactions in the presence of transient market impact
2012
Trading large volumes of a financial asset in order driven markets requires the use of algorithmic execution dividing the volume in many transactions in order to minimize costs due to market impact. A proper design of an optimal execution strategy strongly depends on a careful modeling of market impact, i.e. how the price reacts to trades. In this paper we consider a recently introduced market impact model (Bouchaud et al., 2004), which has the property of describing both the volume and the temporal dependence of price change due to trading. We show how this model can be used to describe price impact also in aggregated trade time or in real time. We then solve analytically and calibrate wit…
Innovation efficiency: a bibliometric review and future research agenda
2021
Innovation efficiency has become a phenomenon of global interest. This paper reviews 165 articles from academic journals of innovation efficiency, applies the data-driven text mining approach to ma...
Agricultural and Biotechnology Patents as an Adaptation Strategy to Climate Change: A Regional Analysis of European Farmer’s Efficiency
2022
This chapter analyses the effect of innovation encouraged by climate change challenges on European farmers’ technical efficiency. Using the stochastic frontier approach, we estimate the impact of agri-cultural patents on farmers’ technical efficiency by taking into account both unobservable heterogeneity and heteroscedasticity in the inefficiency term. Our findings suggest that European farmers remain quite far from the maximum frontier and irrespective of the country in which they reside; farmers who innovate are more efficient than those who do not. Thus, the inefficiency of agricultural agents in the European context leaves space for policies that incentivise firms to adopt climate chang…
Does cutting back the public sector improve efficiency? Some evidence from 15 European countries
2013
The successful development of the welfare state that transpired for three decades after WWII in the developed countries, came to a halt around the end of the 1980s. Since then, the number of articles and books dedicated to the crisis of the welfare state has increased. We can now assert that at the turn of the century, almost all industrialized countries had cut at least “some” entitlements in their welfare program along with other expenditure items, and the trend continued in the first decade of this century. To defend the cuts and possibly to justify continuing cuts, several economic reasons, both theoretical and empirical, have been highlighted. From mention of Baumol’s disease to the fi…
How Does the Public Spending Affect Technical Efficiency? Some Evidence from 15 European Countries
2019
The relationship between government size and economic growth has been widely debated. Departing from this issue, we provide an empirical analysis of the impact of government size on technical efficiency. The aim of this paper is to estimate by using a True Random Effect model the impact of public sector’s size and of public expenditure components on 15 European countries’ technical efficiency from 1996 to 2011. Using the total public expenditure as a proxy for the government size we estimate simultaneously national optimal production function and technical efficiency model by controlling for income distribution and institutional quality. Our main findings show that the effect of public sect…
Technical efficiency and regional disparities in Italy
2019
This paper is a contribution to the literature on Italy's regional disparities with a focus on the nature and determinants of firms' technical efficiency. Our analysis concerns a vast number of Italian firms for the decade 2008-2017 and considers the firms that are annually obliged to deposit their balance sheet. A frontier stochastic analysis is used as a method for estimating the technical efficiency of each firm. Our results offer a detailed representation on a provincial basis of disparity gaps. Moreover econometric analysis provides convincing evidence on the importance of territorial variables in the determinants of technical efficiency.
Smart cities: a policy tool for city efficiency?
2016
The level of interest in smart cities has been growing during these last years. The academic literature (Hollands, 2008; Caragliu et al., 2009, Nijkamp et al., 2011 and Lombardi et al., 2012) has identified a number of factors that characterise a city as smart, such as economic development, business-friendly, environmental sustainability, social innovation, information and knowledge process, and human and social capital. Thus, the smartness concept is strictly linked to urban efficiency in a multifaceted way as well as to citizens’ wellbeing through the use of appropriate technologies. Instead, from a “political perspective” smartness is mainly related to the ability of using ICT as instrum…