| Dedication | p. v |
| List of Figures | p. xi |
| List of Tables | p. xv |
| Preface | p. xvii |
| Acknowledgments | p. xxi |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| What this work is about | p. 1 |
| Improving the nonparametric approach in frontier analysis | p. 4 |
| An outline of the work | p. 8 |
| Methodology | |
| The Measurement of Efficiency | p. 13 |
| Productivity and Efficiency | p. 13 |
| A short history of thought | p. 16 |
| The economic model | p. 19 |
| A taxonomy of efficient frontier models | p. 25 |
| The nonparametric frontier approach | p. 30 |
| Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) | p. 31 |
| Free Disposal Hull (FDH) | p. 33 |
| Recent developments in nonparametric efficiency analysis | p. 39 |
| Statistical Inference in Nonparametric Frontier Estimation | p. 43 |
| Statistical foundation | p. 43 |
| Introducing stochastic noise in the model | p. 45 |
| Asymptotic results | p. 47 |
| Consistency | p. 47 |
| Sampling distributions | p. 49 |
| Bootstrap techniques and applications | p. 50 |
| Bootstrap in frontier models | p. 52 |
| Correcting the bias | p. 54 |
| Bootstrap confidence intervals | p. 55 |
| Is the bootstrap consistent? | p. 56 |
| Applications of the bootstrap | p. 63 |
| Bootstrapping FDH estimators | p. 64 |
| Nonparametric Robust Estimators: Partial Frontiers | p. 65 |
| A re-formulation based on the probability of being dominated | p. 66 |
| Order-m frontiers and efficiency scores | p. 68 |
| Order- quantile-type frontiers | p. 72 |
| Properties of partial frontier estimators | p. 77 |
| Statistical properties | p. 77 |
| Robust estimators of the full frontier | p. 77 |
| Advantages of using partial frontiers | p. 78 |
| Detection of outliers | p. 79 |
| Summary of the results for the output oriented case | p. 81 |
| Parametric approximations of robust nonparametric frontiers | p. 85 |
| Two stage methods | p. 87 |
| The bootstrap algorithms | p. 89 |
| Multivariate parametric approximations | p. 90 |
| Generalized Cobb-Douglas parametric model | p. 91 |
| Translog parametric model | p. 93 |
| Conditional Measures of Efficiency | p. 95 |
| Explaining efficiency in the literature | p. 96 |
| Introducing external-environmental variables | p. 100 |
| Conditional full frontier measures | p. 100 |
| Conditional order-m measures | p. 101 |
| Conditional order- measures | p. 103 |
| Summary for the output oriented case | p. 105 |
| Bandwidth selection | p. 108 |
| Univariate case | p. 109 |
| Multivariate case | p. 110 |
| An econometric methodology | p. 113 |
| Global effect of Z on the production process | p. 113 |
| A decomposition of conditional efficiency | p. 119 |
| Simulated illustrations | p. 121 |
| Univariate Z | p. 122 |
| Multivariate Z | p. 124 |
| Applications | |
| Economies of Scale, Scope and Experience in the Italian Motor-Vehicle Sector | p. 135 |
| Introduction | p. 135 |
| Data description | p. 139 |
| Definition of outputs and inputs | p. 142 |
| An exploratory investigation | p. 145 |
| Aggregation of inputs and outputs | p. 148 |
| Testing returns to scale and bootstrapping efficiency scores | p. 151 |
| Economies of scale | p. 157 |
| Economies of scope | p. 160 |
| Economies of experience | p. 163 |
| Conclusions | p. 164 |
| Age, Scale and Concentration Effects in a Public Research System | p. 167 |
| Introduction | p. 167 |
| Data description | p. 176 |
| Scale and concentration effects | p. 178 |
| Age effects on CNR scientific productivity | p. 181 |
| Robust parametric approximation of multioutput distance function | p. 186 |
| Conclusions | p. 191 |
| Exploring the Effects of Manager Tenure, fund Age and their Interaction | p. 193 |
| Introduction | p. 193 |
| Data description | p. 196 |
| Impact of mutual fund manager tenure on performance | p. 199 |
| Interaction between manager tenure and fund age | p. 208 |
| Conclusions | p. 216 |
| Conclusions | p. 217 |
| References | p. 221 |
| Topic Index | p. 243 |
| Author Index | p. 245 |
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