Sedimentological constraints on the late Silurian history of the Highland Boundary Fault, Scotland : Implications for Midland Valley Basin development

Peer reviewedPostprin

Comparing TFP Catching-up and Capital Deepening in US and European Growths: A Directional Distance Function Approach

In Solow’s model the income convergence between countries arises from two main sources: a capital deepening effect resulting from the diminishing returns of the production technology and a technological transfer/diffusion effect related to Total Factor Productivity (TFP) differences. A large literature has been devoted to analyze these effects but most of the studies suffer from three weaknesses by defining the US as the a priori technological leader, by using a parametric functional form and by assuming constant returns to scale for the technology. Our paper offers an alternative approach based on a non-parametric programming framework and the estimation of directional distance functions. We explicitly separate country TFP differences into two components: a technology effect and a scale effect to study the catching-up process on each of them. We also analyze the role of the capital deepening effect by introducing a relevant measure of the structural efficiency which reveals inefficiencies due to changes in input-ratio differences. Our empirical work focuses on 15 European countries (EU) and the US over the period 1980-2004. We use time series procedures to test for convergence for individual countries or sub-sets of countries.TFP Catching-up, Capital Deepening, Convergence, Directional Distance Function. Running title: Comparing TFP Catching-up and Capital Deepening

Technical and economic efficiency measures under short run profit maximizing behavior

The duality between measures of economic and technical efficiency has been extensively studied in the productive efficiency analysis. This duality ensures a meaningful interpretation of technical efficiency as economic efficiency evaluated at the most favorable shadow prices. This paper concentrates on economic efficiency as short run profit efficiency. We first argue that a modified version of Varian’s goodness-of-fit measure provides an appropriate economic efficiency measure in that context. Next, we show that a variant of the McFadden gauge function provides a natural dual efficiency measure for this short run profit efficiency measure. In particular, we establish two attractive properties of that technical efficiency measure: (i) it can be interpreted as Varian’s profit efficiency measure evaluated at shadow prices; (ii) it provides an upper bound for profit efficiency.Profit Efficiency, Technical Efficiency, Technology Distance Functions

How Does Payer Mix and Technical Inefficiency Affect Hospital Net Revenue?

As changes in the US health care system continue to evolve and change, maintaining the financial viability of hospitals is crucial to the system’s operation. Two lines of inquiry have been pursued in describing factors affecting financial viability. The first line of inquiry relates to the external payer mix of patients focusing on patients who are unable to compensate hospitals for the care received. The second line of inquiry focuses on internal management and because hospitals do not typically answer to shareholders, managers become lax and X-inefficiency may arise. In this paper, we assess both these lines of research in order to determine if payment source by patients and/or managerial efficiency contributes to higher total net revenue. By using a weighted DEA we measured the inefficiency of inputs to the production process on our sample of 144 hospitals operating in Florida during 2005. We used the derived inefficient use of inputs along with the number of days by payer group (Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, other public insurance, and uncompensated care) in order to explain their effects on total net revenue. To preview our results, we found that the inefficient use of beds and the provision of care to patients who are considered as uncompensated care reduce significantly total net revenue while private pay patients and patients covered by other public insurance add to total net revenue. These findings add to the literature by showing that it is patient payer mix and managerial inefficiency together affect hospital financial viability. We also demonstrate how our findings contribute to current policy debates both on the federal US and the state of Florida level.Hospital, Net Revenue, Efficiency, Payer, Uncompensated Care

Optimal productive size of hospital’s intensive care units

Hospital, Intensive Care Units, Returns to Scale, Optimal Size

Comparing French and US hospital technologies: a directional input distance function approach

French and US hospital technologies are compared using directional input distance functions. The aggregation properties of the directional distance function allow comparison of hospital industry-level performance as well as standard firm-level performance with regard to productive efficiency. In addition, the underlying constituents of efficiency - in the short run, congestion and technical inefficiency, and in the long run, scale inefficiency - are analysed by decomposing the overall measure. By virtue of using the directional distance function, it is also possible to obtain an estimate of a lower bound on allocative inefficiency. It is found that French and US hospitals use quite different technologies. Long run scale inefficiencies cause most of the French hospitals' inefficiency, while short run technical inefficiency is the main source of overall productive inefficiency in the US hospitals

Spin-orbit resonances and rotation of coorbital bodies in quasi-circular orbits

The rotation of asymmetric bodies in eccentric Keplerian orbits can be chaotic when there is some overlap of spin-orbit resonances. Here we show that the rotation of two coorbital bodies (two planets orbiting a star or two satellites of a planet) can also be chaotic even for quasi-circular orbits around the central body. When dissipation is present, the rotation period of a body on a nearly circular orbit is believed to always end synchronous with the orbital period. Here we demonstrate that for coorbital bodies in quasi-circular orbits, stable non-synchronous rotation is possible for a wide range of mass ratios and body shapes. We further show that the rotation becomes chaotic when the natural rotational libration frequency, due to the axial asymmetry, is of the same order of magnitude as the orbital libration frequency