Are Indian Firms too Small? A Nonparametric Analysis of Cost Efficiency and Industry Structure of Indian Manufacturing

In this paper we use the 2004-05 Annual Survey of Industries data to estimate the levels of cost efficiency of Indian manufacturing firms in the various states and also get state level measures of industrial organization (IO) efficiency. The empirical results show the presence of considerable cost inefficiency in a majority of the states. Further, we also find that, on average, Indian firms are too small. Consolidating them to attain the optimal scale would further enhance efficiency and lower average cost

A Bootstrap-Regression Procedure to Capture Unit Specific Effects in Data Envelopment Analysis

The Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) efficiency score obtained for an individual firm is a point estimate without any confidence interval around it. In recent years, researchers have resorted to bootstrapping in order to generate empirical distributions of efficiency scores. This procedure assumes that all firms have the same probability of getting an efficiency score from any specified interval within the [0,1] range. We propose a bootstrap procedure that empirically generates the conditional distribution of efficiency for each individual firm given systematic factors that influence its efficiency. Instead of resampling directly from the pooled DEA scores, we first regress these scores on a set of explanatory variables not included at the DEA stage and bootstrap the residuals from this regression. These pseudo-efficiency scores incorporate the systematic effects of unit-specific factors along with the contribution of the randomly drawn residual. Data from the U.S. airline industry are utilized in an empirical application

Efficiency in Managing the Environment and the Opportunity Cost of Pollution Abatement

Using the directional distance function we study a cross section of 110 countries to examine the efficiency of management of the tradeoffs between pollution and income. The DEA model is reformulated to permit \u27reverse disposability\u27 of the bad output. Further, we interpret the optimal solution of the multiplier form of the DEA model as an iso-inefficiency line. This permits us to measure the shadow cost of the bad output for a country that is in the interior, rather than on the frontier of the production possibilities set. We also compare the relative environmental performance of countries in terms of emission intensity adjusted for technical efficiency. Only 10% of the countries are found to be on the frontier. Also, there is considerable inter-country variation in the imputed opportunity cost of CO2 reduction. Further, differences in technical efficiency contribute substantially to differences in the observed levels of CO2 intensity

The commonly used eye-specific sev-GAL4 and GMR-GAL4 drivers in Drosophila melanogaster are expressed in tissues other than eyes also

The binary GAL4-UAS system of conditional gene expression is widely used by Drosophila geneticists to target expression of the desired transgene in tissue of interest. In many studies, a preferred target tissue is the Drosophila eye, for which the sev-GAL4 and GMR-GAL4 drivers are most widely used since they are believed to be expressed exclusively in the developing eye cells. However, several reports have noted lethality following expression of certain transgenes under these GAL4 drivers notwithstanding the fact that eye is not essential for survival of the fly. Therefore, to explore the possibility that these drivers may also be active in tissues other than eye, we examined the expression of UAS-GFP reporter driven by the sev-GAL4 or GMR-GAL4 drivers. We found that both these drivers are indeed expressed in additional tissues, including a common set of specific neuronal cells in larval and pupal ventral and cerebral ganglia. Neither sev nor glass gene has so far been reported to be expressed in these neuronal cells. Expression pattern of sev-GAL4 driver parallels that of the endogenous Sevenless protein. In addition to cells in which sev-GAL4 is expressed, the GMR-GAL4 is expressed in several other larval cell types also. Further, two different GMR-GAL4 lines also show some specific differences in their expression domains outside the eye discs. These findings emphasize the need for a careful confirmation of the expression domains of a GAL4 driver being used in a given study, rather than relying only on the empirically claimed expression domains