Measuring efficiency and productivity in professional football teams: Evidence from the English Premier League

Professional football clubs are unusual businesses, their performance judged on and off the field of play. This study is concerned with measuring the efficiency of clubs in the English Premier League. Information from clubs’ financial statements is used as a measure of corporate performance. To measure changes in efficiency and productivity the Malmquist non-parametric technique has been used. This is derived from the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) linear programming approach, with Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) being used to ensure the cohesion of the input-output variables. The study concludes that while clubs operate close to efficient levels for the assessed models, there is limited technological advance in their performance in terms of the displacement of the technological frontier

A quantitative systems pharmacology approach, incorporating a novel liver model, for predicting pharmacokinetic drug-drug interactions

All pharmaceutical companies are required to assess pharmacokinetic drug-drug interactions (DDIs) of new chemical entities (NCEs) and mathematical prediction helps to select the best NCE candidate with regard to adverse effects resulting from a DDI before any costly clinical studies. Most current models assume that the liver is a homogeneous organ where the majority of the metabolism occurs. However, the circulatory system of the liver has a complex hierarchical geometry which distributes xenobiotics throughout the organ. Nevertheless, the lobule (liver unit), located at the end of each branch, is composed of many sinusoids where the blood flow can vary and therefore creates heterogeneity (e.g. drug concentration, enzyme level). A liver model was constructed by describing the geometry of a lobule, where the blood velocity increases toward the central vein, and by modeling the exchange mechanisms between the blood and hepatocytes. Moreover, the three major DDI mechanisms of metabolic enzymes; competitive inhibition, mechanism based inhibition and induction, were accounted for with an undefined number of drugs and/or enzymes. The liver model was incorporated into a physiological-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) model and simulations produced, that in turn were compared to ten clinical results. The liver model generated a hierarchy of 5 sinusoidal levels and estimated a blood volume of 283 mL and a cell density of 193 × 106 cells/g in the liver. The overall PBPK model predicted the pharmacokinetics of midazolam and the magnitude of the clinical DDI with perpetrator drug(s) including spatial and temporal enzyme levels changes. The model presented herein may reduce costs and the use of laboratory animals and give the opportunity to explore different clinical scenarios, which reduce the risk of adverse events, prior to costly human clinical studies

Efficiency and effectiveness of Spanish football teams: a three-stage-DEA approach

Data envelopment analysis, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Sports, Football,

DEA performance assessment of mutual funds

The objectives of this paper are manyfold. First we present a comprehensive review of the literature of DEA models for the performance assessment of mutual funds. Then we discuss the problem of the presence of negative returns in DEA modeling for mutual funds and we identify a DEA model that is financially justified and tackles the issue of negative returns in a natural way. Moreover, we present an empirical application on real market data, considering different risk measures.\ud We consider also different holding periods, which include both a period of financial crisis and one of financial recovery. Moreover, we compare the results of the DEA performance measure with those obtained with traditional financial indicators