Where have all the data gone? Stochastic production frontiers with multiply imputed German establishment data

Abstract

In this paper, stochastic production frontier models are estimated with IAB establishment data from waves 2002 and 2003 to find important determinants of productivity and ineffciency. The data suffer from nonresponse in the most important variables (output, capital and labor) leading to the loss of 25 % of the observations and possibly imprecise estimates and invalid test statistics. Therefore, the missing values are multiply imputed. Analyzes of the estimation results show that, particularly in the ineffciency submodel, working with multiply imputed data reveals some interesting and plausible results which are not available when ignoring missing observations