11,004 research outputs found
Economies of scale and efficiency measurement in Switzerland's Nursing homes
This paper examines the cost efficiency in the nursing home industry, an issue of concern to Swiss policy makers because of the explosive growth of national expenditure on elderly care and the aging of the population. A stochastic cost frontier model with a translog function has been applied to a balanced panel data of 1780 observations from 356 nursing homes operating over five years (1998-2002) in Switzerland. We compare the estimation results from different panel data econometric techniques focusing on the various methods of specification of unobserved heterogeneity across firms. In particular, the potential effects of such unobserved factors on the estimation results and their interpretation have been discussed. The paper eventually addresses three empirical issues: (1) the measurement of economies of scale in the nursing home sector, (2) the assessment of the economic performance of the firms by estimating their cost efficiency scores, and (3) the role of unobserved heterogeneity in the estimation process. The findings suggest that the economies of scale are an important potential source of cost reduction in a majority of Swiss nursing homes. Taking the size as given the efficiency performance of most individual units is practically very close to the estimated best practice. Nevertheless, the efficiency estimates suggest that some of the nursing homes can significantly reduce their costs by improving their operations.COST EFFICIENCY, ECONOMIES OF SCALE, NURSING HOMES, STOCHASTIC FRONTIER, PANEL DATA
The performance of Bulgarian food markets during reform
Food policy often depends on markets and markets depend on institutions. But how good do institutions have to be before reforms can be launched? Relying on well timed surveys of agricultural prices and a joint study by the Government of Bulgaria and the World Bank on agricultural market institutions, this paper presents evidence that performance in food markets improved following significant policy reforms in Bulgaria, although public institutions remained weak. This suggests that even though strong institutions are preferred to weak ones, it can be costly and impractical to delay policy reforms until work on strengthening institutions is finished. Still, measured performance varied by place and by commodity, suggesting that markets developed at different tempos and that the distribution of benefits from improved markets was uneven. This points to the need to address the costs of adjustment as policies change. The paper introduces a new approach to measure market performance based on composite-error techniques.Markets and Market Access,Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Economic Theory&Research,Access to Markets,Agribusiness
Short and long-term wind turbine power output prediction
In the wind energy industry, it is of great importance to develop models that
accurately forecast the power output of a wind turbine, as such predictions are
used for wind farm location assessment or power pricing and bidding,
monitoring, and preventive maintenance. As a first step, and following the
guidelines of the existing literature, we use the supervisory control and data
acquisition (SCADA) data to model the wind turbine power curve (WTPC). We
explore various parametric and non-parametric approaches for the modeling of
the WTPC, such as parametric logistic functions, and non-parametric piecewise
linear, polynomial, or cubic spline interpolation functions. We demonstrate
that all aforementioned classes of models are rich enough (with respect to
their relative complexity) to accurately model the WTPC, as their mean squared
error (MSE) is close to the MSE lower bound calculated from the historical
data. We further enhance the accuracy of our proposed model, by incorporating
additional environmental factors that affect the power output, such as the
ambient temperature, and the wind direction. However, all aforementioned
models, when it comes to forecasting, seem to have an intrinsic limitation, due
to their inability to capture the inherent auto-correlation of the data. To
avoid this conundrum, we show that adding a properly scaled ARMA modeling layer
increases short-term prediction performance, while keeping the long-term
prediction capability of the model
Stock Picking via Nonsymmetrically Pruned Binary Decision Trees
Stock picking is the field of financial analysis that is of particular interest for many professional investors and researchers. In this study stock picking is implemented via binary classification trees. Optimal tree size is believed to be the crucial factor in forecasting performance of the trees. While there exists a standard method of tree pruning, which is based on the cost-complexity tradeoff and used in the majority of studies employing binary decision trees, this paper introduces a novel methodology of nonsymmetric tree pruning called Best Node Strategy (BNS). An important property of BNS is proven that provides an easy way to implement the search of the optimal tree size in practice. BNS is compared with the traditional pruning approach by composing two recursive portfolios out of XETRA DAX stocks. Performance forecasts for each of the stocks are provided by constructed decision trees. It is shown that BNS clearly outperforms the traditional approach according to the backtesting results and the Diebold-Mariano test for statistical significance of the performance difference between two forecasting methods.decision tree, stock picking, pruning, earnings forecasting, data mining
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