The impact of competition on productive efficiency in European railways

This paper empirically explores the relationship between competition design and productive efficiency in the railway industry. We use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to construct efficiency scores, and explain these scores, using variables reflecting institutional factors and competition design. Our results suggest that competitive tendering improves productive efficiency, which is in line with economic intuition as well as with expectations on the design of competition. We also find that free entry lowers productive efficiency. A possible explanation for this result is that free entry may disable railway operators to reap economies of density. Our final result is that more autonomy of management lowers productive efficiency. Most of the incumbent railway companies are state owned and do not face any competitive pressure. As a consequence, increased independence without sufficient competition and adequate regulation may deteriorate incentives for productive efficiency.

Productive efficiency in banking

Bank management ; Productivity

Mixed oligopoly, productive efficiency, and spillover

The purpose of this paper is to examine the public sector's cost-reducing investment when there exists the effect of R&D spillover. We show that the investment in the mixed oligopoly is not higher than that in the public monopoly. When the cost-reducing effect of investment for each firm is the same, the investment in the mixed oligopoly is equal to that in the public monopoly. In such a case, the emergence of private firms has a positive impact on social welfare. Our model is an extended version of Nishimori and Ogawa (2002), which study the R&D investment by the public sector.state-owned public firm

Business start-ups and productive efficiency

This paper studies efficient allocation of resources in an economy in which agents are initially heterogeneous with regard to their wealth levels and whether they have ideas or not. An agent with an idea can start a business that generates random returns. Agents have private information about (1) their initial types, (2) how they allocate their resources, and (3) the realized returns. The unobservability of returns creates a novel motive for subsidizing agents who have ideas but lack resources to invest in them. To analyze this motive in isolation, the paper assumes that agents are risk-neutral and abstracts away from equality and insurance considerations. The unobservability of initial types and actions implies that the subsidy that poor agents with ideas receive is limited by incentive compatibility: the society should provide other agents with enough incentives so that they do not claim to be poor and have ideas. The paper then provides an implementation of the constrained-efficient allocation in an incomplete markets setup that is similar to the U.S. Small Business Administration's Business Loan Program. Finally, the paper extends the model in several dimensions to show that the results are robust to these generalizations of the model.Productivity

Productive Efficiency in 16 European Countries

We investigate in this paper differences in productive efficiency across sixteen European countries. In order to assess differences in productive efficiency, we have built a dynamic input-output model and computed for each country the balanced growth rate and the balanced output composition. After that, we investigate how the differences existing between the output composition for balanced growth and the actual one relate to the differences between the rate of balanced growth and the actual one. In the final part of the paper we examine the influence of individual sectors on the rate of balanced growth by looking for growth-sensitive sectors.Productive efficiency, input-output, growth, Europe

Cartels, managerial incentives, and productive efficiency in German coal mining, 1881-1913

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of cartelisation and managerial incentives on the productive efficiency of German coal mining corporations. We focus on coal mining in the Ruhr district, Germany’s main mining area. We use stochastic frontier analysis and an unbalanced dynamic panel data set for up to 28 firms for the years 1881-1913 to measure productive efficiency. We show that coal was mined with decreasing returns to scale. Moreover, it turns out that cartelisation did not affect productive efficiency. Controlling for corporate governance variables shows that stronger managerial incentives were significantly correlated with productive efficiency, whereas the debt-equity ratio did not influence it.Economic history; Germany pre-1913; Cartel; Productive efficiency; Corporate Governance

Local market consolidation and bank productive efficiency

The recent banking literature has evaluated the impact of mergers on the efficiency of the merging parties [e.g., Rhoades (1993), Shaffer (1993), Fixler and Zieschang (1993)]. Similarly, there has been analysis of the impact of eliminating bank entry restrictions on the average performance of banks [Jayaratne and Strahan (1998)]. The evidence suggests that acquiring banks are typically more efficient than are acquired banks, resulting in the potential for the new combined organization to be more efficient and, therefore, for the merger to be welfare enhancing. The evidence also suggests, however, that these potential gains are often not realized. This has led some to question the benefits resulting from the recent increase in bank merger activity. We take a somewhat more comprehensive and micro-oriented approach and evaluate the impact of actual and potential competition resulting from market-entry mergers and reductions in entry barriers on bank efficiency. In particular, in addition to the efficiency gains realized by the parties involved in a bank merger, economic theory argues that additional efficiency gains should result from the impact of the merger on the degree of local market competition. We therefore examine the impact of increased competition resulting from mergers and acquisitions on the productive efficiency of incumbent banks. Our findings are consistent with economic theory: as competition increases as a result of entry or the creation of a more viable local competitor, the incumbent banks respond by increasing their level of cost efficiency. We find this efficiency increase to be in addition to any efficiency gains resulting from increases in potential competition occurring with the initial elimination of certain entry barriers. Thus, consistent with economic theory, new entrants and reductions in entry barriers lead incumbent firms to increase their productive efficiency to enable them to be viable in the more competitive environment. Studies evaluating the impact of bank mergers on the efficiency of the combining parties alone may be overlooking the most significant welfare enhancing aspect of merger activity. We do not find evidence of profit efficiency gains. In fact, the mergers are associated with decreases in profit efficiency; perhaps indicating that revenues may also be competed away from incumbents as a result of mergers.Bank mergers

Productive Efficiency in Agriculture: Corn Production in Mexico

Using a stochastic production frontier model and data for 2002 from a representative sample of Mexican rural households, in this paper we first study empirically whether or not small and medium farmers produce corn efficiently. The results show that corn production is inefficient, nation-wide and for both commercial and subsistence farmers. Our findings also show that this is even more so for subsistence producers and for the Center and the South-southeast regions of rural Mexico. In addition, we find that subsistence farmers use less prod uctive inputs (seeds and agrochemicals) with respect to commercial farmers. Based on these results, we then apply a regression model to inquire about the factors explaining inefficiency. We get that farmers facing natural disasters, that produce corn for subsistence using diverse seed varieties of the grain in plots with less than 1 hectare and indigenous, are more inefficient than other farmers. The results also indicate that households located in communities with marketing facilities and that have benefited from infrastructural investments, produce corn in a less inefficient manner. The detailed nature of the data used allows us to have results that differentiate rural regions as well as commercial and subsistence corn producers, and hence, to suggest focalized policies for rural development.Crop Production/Industries, Productivity Analysis,

Competition and Growth in Neo-Schumpeterian Models

We study the effect of product market competition on the incentives to innovate and the economy’s rate of growth in an endogenous growth model. We extend previous works in industrial organization by assuming that innovation is sequential and cumulative, and early endogenous growth models by accounting for the possibility that in each period many asymmetric firms (i.e., an endogenously determined number of successive innovators) are simultaneously active. We identify the price effect, the front loading of profits, and the productive efficiency effect associated with an increase in competitive pressure. The price effect reduces the incentives to innovate, but both the front loading of profits and the productive efficiency effect raise the incentives to innovate. We demonstrate circumstances in which the productive efficiency effect dominates the price effect. In these circumstances, the front loading of profits and the fact that the productive efficiency effect dominates the price effect compound to make the equilibrium rate of growth increase with the intensity of competition.

X-Inefficiencies in the Residential Real Estate Market: A Stochastic Frontier Approach

This article examines the productive efficiency levels present in the market for residential real estate brokerage services by employing the stochastic frontier approach. The only prior study (Anderson, Zumpano, Elder and Fok, 1998) that examined productive efficiency in this sector employed data envelopment analysis. This current article addresses potential statistical limitations of Data Envelopment Analysis and uses an alternative statistical tool, the stochastic frontier approach, to estimate X-efficiencies. This technique overcomes many of the statistical limitations of DEA and provides additional productive efficiency estimates. The results suggest that residential real estate brokerage firms are relatively efficient, in contrast to the earlier study that found significant inefficiencies present in this market. Firms could only reduce their average total costs by 12% given firm outputs and input prices. Additionally, the firms were divided into three size categories to examine the impact of firm size on efficiency. The results indicate that small firms are the most efficient group. Hence, there seems to be a tradeoff between scale efficiency and productive efficiency.