Search results for "stochastic frontier"
showing 10 items of 27 documents
Disentangling Tax Evasion from Inefficiency in Firms Tax Declaration: An Integrated Approach
2019
In this article we present a new methodology to support fiscal monitoring by the Italian Revenue Agency (IRA) with the aim of improving current taxpayers fiscal compliance and fighting tax evasion within small and medium enterprises. In fact, given the methodology behind the Sector Studies (Studi di Settore - SdS) system, there is room for firms to implement tax evasion strategies by simply adjusting revenues (and costs) toward an estimated average threshold (known ex-ante), the so called "presumptive" revenues, and achieving the fiscal "congruity" status. By estimating a production function through stochastic frontier analysis we avoid estimating the average threshold know ex-ante and can …
Drivers of productivity change: a comparison of English and Welsh water only and water and sewerage companies
2021
In regulated industries, such as the water industry, it is of great significance to estimate productivity change as it helps policy makers to evaluate the effectiveness of regulatory regime and ind...
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…
Stochastic frontier models using R
2020
Abstract The production function is usually assumed to specify the maximum output obtainable, from a given set of inputs, describing the boundary or frontier of the obtainable output from each feasible combination of input; it relates the production process of individual units to the efficient border of the production possibilities. The measure of the distance of each unit from the border is the most immediate way to assess its (in)efficiency. However, the production function is not generally known, but it has only a set of information on each production unit and it is therefore essential to develop techniques to estimate the production frontier. Starting from the packages already developed…
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…