Identification of Segments of French Urban Public Transport with a Latent Class Frontier Model

Abstract

This paper analyses technical efficiency of French urban public transport from 1995 to 2002 with unbalanced panel data. The latent class frontier model is used allowing the identification of different segments in the production frontier. We find that there are three statistically significant segments in the sample. Therefore, we conclude that no common transport policy can reach all of the transportation companies analysed, thereby requiring transport policies by segments.Urban public transport, stochastic production frontier, latent class model, technical efficiency, panel data.