This book surveys the state-of-the-art in efficiency and productivity analysis, examining advances in the analytical foundations and empirical applications. The analytical techniques developed in this book for efficiency provide alternative ways of defining optimum outcome sets, typically as a (technical) production frontier or as an (economic) cost, revenue or profit frontier, and alternative ways of measuring efficiency relative to an appropriate frontier. Simultaneously, the analytical techniques developed for efficiency analysis extend directly to productivity analysis, thereby providing alternative methods for estimating productivity levels, and productivity change through time or productivity variation across producers. This book includes chapters using data envelopment analysis (DEA) or stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) as quantitative techniques capable of measuring efficiency and productivity. Across the book's 15 chapters, it broadly extends into popular application areas including agriculture, banking and finance, and municipal performance, and relatively new application areas including corporate social responsibility, the value of intangible assets, land consolidation, and the measurement of economic well-being. The chapters also cover topics such as permutation tests for production frontier shifts, new indices of total factor productivity, and also randomized controlled trials and production frontiers.

Autorentext
Juan Aparicio is an Associate Professor at the Center of Operations Research of the University Miguel Hernandez, Elche (Alicante), Spain. He is the director of the Center of Operations Research. He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics in 2007 at the UMH. He is Co-Chair (with Knox Lovell) of the Santander Chair on Efficiency and Productivity. His research interests mainly include Efficiency and Productivity Analysis.
C. A. Knox Lovell is Honorary Professor with the Centre for Efficiency and Productivity Analysis in the School of Economics at the University of Queensland. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Productivity Analysis for a decade. He has authored several books, including Production Frontiers (with Färe and Grosskopf) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (with Kumbhakhar) for Cambridge University Press.
Jesus T. Pastor is a Professor in the Department of Statistics, Mathematics and Informatics at the Center of Operations Research of University Miguel Hernandez, Elche (Alicante), Spain. He earned his Bachelor's, Master, and Ph.D., all in Mathematics, at the University of Valencia, and was awarded as one of the three most distinguished Spanish Scientists of 2013 by the Scientific Spanish Association. His research interests are in Productivity and Efficiency, Statistics, and Informatics.
Joe Zhu is Professor of Operations Analytics in the Foisie Business School, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is an internationally recognized expert in methods of performance evaluation and benchmarking using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and his research interests are in the areas of operations and business analytics, productivity modeling, and performance evaluation and benchmarking. He has published and co-edited several books focusing on performance evaluation and benchmarking using DEA and developed the DEAFrontier software.

Inhalt
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. New Definitions of Economic Cross-Efficiency.- Chapter 3. Evaluating Efficiency in Non-Homogeneous Environments.- Chapter 4. Testing Positive Endogeneity in Inputs in Data Envelopment Analysis.- Chapter 5. Modelling Pollution-Generating Technologies: A Numerical Comparison of Non-Parametric Approaches.- Chapter 6. On the Estimation of Educational Technical Efficiency from Sample Designs: A New Methodology using Robust Nonparametric Models.- Chapter 7. Local Circularity of Six Classic Price Indexes.- Chapter 8. Robust DEA efficiency scores: A heuristic for the combinatorial/probabilistic approach.- Chapter 9. Corporate Social Responsibility and Firms' Dynamic Productivity Change.- Chapter 10. A Novel Two-Phase Approach to Computing a Regional Social Progress Index.- Chapter 11. A Two-Level Top-Down Decomposition of Aggregate Productivity Growth: The Role of Infrastructure.- Chapter 12. European energy efficiency evaluation based on the use of super efficiency under undesirable outputs in SBM models.- Chapter 13. Probability of Default and Banking Efficiency. How Does the Market Respond?- Chapter 14. Measuring Global Municipal Performance in Heterogeneous Contexts: A Semi-Nonparametric Frontier Approach.- Chapter 15. The Impact of Land Consolidation on Livestock Production in Asturias´ Parishes: A Spatial Production Analysis.