The thesis examines technical efficiency using frontier efficiency estimation techniques from parametric and non-parametric approaches. Five different frontier efficiency estimation techniques are considered which are SFA, DFA, DEA-CCR, DEA-BCC and DEA-RAM. These techniques are then used on an artificially generated panel dataset using a two-input two-output production function framework based on characteristics of German life-insurers. The key contribution of the thesis is firstly, a study that uses simulated panel dataset to estimate frontier efficiency techniques and secondly, a research framework that compares multiple frontier efficiency techniques across parametric and non-parametric approaches in the context of simulated panel data. The findings suggest that, as opposed to previous studies, parametric and non-parametric approaches can both generate comparable technical efficiency scores with simulated data. Moreover, techniques from parametric approaches, i.e. SFA and DFA are consistent with each other whereas the same applies to non-parametric approaches, i.e. DEA models. The research study also discusses some important theoretical and methodological implication of the findings and suggests some ways whereby future research can enable to overcome some of the restrictions associated with current approaches.

Yes / We assess, for the first time in the literature, the impact of green credit on bank efficiency. We find that green credit has a negative impact on bank efficiency. However, the effect is heterogeneous among different types of banks. While small and low capitalized banks are more affected, the impact is lower in banks with higher levels of risk. On the other hand, we find that highly capitalized banks can offset the negative effects of green credit, while large banks and those highly involved in green credit, benefit from this activity.

Evaluations of the Higher Education Sector are receiving increased attention, due to the rising expenditures and the absence of efficiency enhancing market pressure. To what extent universities are able to eliminate inefficiency is a question that has only partially been answered. This paper argues that heterogeneity among universities as well as persistent inefficiency hinder the institutions to achieve full efficiency - at least in the short run. Two standard and one novel specification of the Stochastic Frontier Analysis are applied to a new, comprehensive set of panel data to show how the standard efficiency evaluation changes when both aspects are taken into account. It is the first time that the idea of persistent inefficiency is considered in the analysis of the German Higher Education Sector. The comparison reveals that the disregard of heterogeneity distorts the estimation results towards lower efficiency values. The newly introduced specification improves the accuracy of the heterogeneity assumption and exposes that inefficiency tends to be long term and persistent rather than short term and residual. This implies that increasing efficiency requires a comprehensive change of the university structure.

Evaluations of the Higher Education Sector are receiving increased attention, due to the rising expenditures and the absence of efficiency enhancing market pressure. To what extent universities are able to eliminate inefficiency is a question that has only partially been answered. This paper argues that heterogeneity among universities as well as persistent inefficiency hinder the institutions to achieve full efficiency - at least in the short run. Two standard and one novel specification of the Stochastic Frontier Analysis are applied to a new, comprehensive set of panel data to show how the standard efficiency evaluation changes when both aspects are taken into account. It is the first time that the idea of persistent inefficiency is considered in the analysis of the German Higher Education Sector. The comparison reveals that the disregard of heterogeneity distorts the estimation results towards lower efficiency values. The newly introduced specification improves the accuracy of the heterogeneity assumption and exposes that inefficiency tends to be long term and persistent rather than short term and residual. This implies that increasing efficiency requires a comprehensive change of the university structure.

Despite measures on the European level to increase the compatibility between the HE sectors of the member states, the recent literature exposes variations in their efficiencies. To gain insights into these differences we split the efficiency term according to the two management levels each university is confronted with. Utilizing a recent advancement in the method to measure efficiency, we separate short-term (transient) and long-term (persistent) efficiency, while controlling for unobserved institution specific heterogeneity. While the first term reflects the efficiency of the individual universities working within the country, the second term echoes the influence of the country specific overall HE structure. The cross-country comparison displays if the overall efficiency difference between countries is related to individual performance of their universities or their HE structure. This allows more purposeful policy recommendation and expands the literature regarding the efficiency of universities in a fundamental way. Choosing Italy and Germany as two important illustrative examples we can take advantage of a novel dataset including characteristics of institutions in both countries for an exceptional long period of time from 2001 to 2011. We show that the Italian universities exhibit a higher overall efficiency value than their German counterparts. With the individual universities working at the upper bound of efficiency in both countries, the overall inefficiency as well as the gap between the countries is caused by persistent, structural inefficiency. To expedite a true European Area of Higher Education future measures should hence aim at the country specific structure, not solely at affecting the activities of single universities.

Since the economic reform was initiated in 1978, the Chinese banking sector has undergone significant changes, particularly during the period under our investigation. This is primarily induced by the WTO entry in 2001, which brought in to full openness the financial market in China. The ultimate objective of the recent banking reform is to promote competition and efficiency as a way of improving the overall competitiveness and banking performance, in order to cope with challenges from foreign competitors. With the purpose of examining whether the recent banking reform is effective in achieving the targets as well as suggesting future policy directions, this study investigates market competition, cost efficiency and profitability in the Chinese banking industry over those critical years (1997-2006) before and after the WTO entry. We first employ both structural (the SCP) and non-structural (the Panzar-Rosse) approach to evaluate market competition. Then we estimate cost efficiency for Chinese banks under the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA). Finally, we assess the relationship between profitability and market structure under the structure-performance hypothesis and the efficient-structure hypothesis. Our findings show that Chinese banking market become less concentrated and more competitive since the WTO entry. Chinese banks improve their cost efficiencies, with state-owned banks are the least efficient while joint equity banks are the most efficient. The explanation for the relationship between profitability and market structure is quite mixed. The acceptance of which hypothesis depends on which dependent variable is used.

中國大陸歷經近三十年的努力，經濟發展快速，經濟實力大為提升，成為世界經濟中不可忽視的力量。自2002年中國加入WTO後，與世界經貿關係更為密切，為因應全球經貿的趨勢，外資企業將擴大進軍中國。從微觀及宏觀經濟角度來看，外資的引進對中國國有企業來說，必定受到程度上的競爭衝擊，但外資對中國經濟的生產技術、產業提升發揮正面積極效果，既能夠刺激國有企業的變革、提昇產品品質、擴大國內消費需求。 本文利用2001-2005年中國30個省、市與直轄市的官方統計資料，運用隨機邊界法（stochastic frontier production function）估計中國本資、港澳台資及外資企業的生產效率。 最主要的研究發現為，2001至2005年，投資於中國大陸的港澳台資與外資企業的投資績效均優於本資企業，且港澳台資與外資企業的投資效率值相近，而本資企業則遠低於港澳台資與外資企業。雖然本資企業的效率值在這五年間處於較低的狀態，但與港澳台資、外資企業之間的差距越來越小。在規模報酬方面，本資、港澳台資與外資企業均處於規模報酬遞增階段。 在各省的效率值上，本資、港澳台資與外資企業分佈不盡相同。本資企業在海南、浙江、江蘇、廣東、上海的效率值最高，港澳台資在北京、上海、寧夏、江蘇、河北最高，外資企業則是在上海、北京、陜西、天津、廣東效率值最高。效率值較高的地區分部仍偏重東部沿海地帶。 在影響效率值的因素方面，經濟區位及資本勞動比是影響中國大陸投資效率高低的重點因素。

The Asian financial crisis in 1997 98 left a severe impact on Malaysia s economy and banking system. This has forced the Malaysian government to undertake financial restructuring initiatives to restore market and public confidence, and to meet the ongoing challenges associated with market structure, financial innovation and globalisation. Therefore, Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) introduced a ten-year Financial Sector Master Plan (FSMP) to strengthen domestic banks and the regulatory structure, and to promote the banks efficiency by stimulating a competitive banking industry through financial liberalisation. The crisis for banks in Malaysia and the region has been extensively studied in the past (Sufian, 2010). However, empirical studies of the post-crisis period, and the implementation of the FSMP, remain limited. Hence, a data set of all banks in Malaysia, which covers the period 2000 2011, was employed to examine the effect of the FSMP s initiatives on Malaysian banks efficiency between 2000 and 2011. To measure this efficiency, this study employs both parametric and nonparametric models: namely, stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA). Economic functions such as, cost-, standard profit- and alternative profit-efficiency were used in a 1-stage SFA model, which includes control variables (e.g. capital adequacy, asset quality and liquidity) and environmental variables (e.g. ownership, size, specialisation, deregulation periods and market structure) in the model specifications. In addition, this study employs SFA as the main measurement method, while the DEA model was used to cross-check consistency (Resti, 1997; Bauer et al., 1998). Both SFA and DEA demonstrated that, in most cases, the consistency was moderate. The level of cost efficiency of Malaysian banks worsened over the years 2000 2011, with average cost efficiency during this period was at 76.5%. Despite the various liberalisation measures introduced to the banking industry particularly during the three phases of the FSMP; 2000 2003; 2004 2007; 2008 2011 cost efficiency trended downward, due to the effects of consolidation by domestic banks, deregulation of interest rates, the introduction of foreign Islamic banks, and the global credit crisis. Banks in Malaysia were forced to adjust their inputs and outputs to the rapid changes in the banking industry, which might have made a negative impact on cost efficiency. On the other hand, the banks demonstrated a steadily increasing profit efficiency trend, which fluctuated with the introduction of interest rate liberalisation (early second phase of the FSMP (i.e. 2004)) and during the global credit crisis (early third phase of the FSMP (i.e. 2008)). The average profit efficiency for 2000 2011 was 93.3%. The profit efficiency exhibited an increasing trend in the first (2000-2003) and second (2004-2007) phases of the FSMP, suggesting that the effect of consolidation by domestic banks had resulted in higher market concentration and greater market power among the remaining banks. However, the profit efficiency average scores fell in 2004, 2008 and 2011. This is attributed to the deregulation of interest rates, the deleveraging of the inflow of foreign funds, and the rapid increase in policy interest rates. At a more granular level, domestic banks were found to be more cost efficient, but marginally less profit efficient, when compared to foreign banks. In terms of bank specialisation, conventional banks were more cost- and profit-efficient than Islamic banks. With regard to economies of scale, the majority of Malaysian banks revealed scale economies, illustrated by a U-shape, with medium-sized banks being more scale efficient than small and large banks. These results suggest that, to enhance Malaysian banks efficiency, the government must maintain competitive pressure on the large domestic banks that were consolidated during the first phase of the FSMP (2000-2003). Policymakers may want to further open up banking markets, improve risk management and governance, encourage financial innovation, and support expansion of smaller banks. The implementation of deregulation initiatives during periods of uncertainty (e.g. the global credit crisis) have also resulted in decreasing trend of cost and profit efficiency. Hence, monitoring initiatives, using tools such as frontier measurement is important for regulator s macro- and micro-prudential surveillance.

This thesis documents, using an unbalanced panel of Top 1000 World banks with observations for 2005 - 2009, three main aspects related to cost and profit efficiency in banking. First, it established that there is no correlation between a bank's rank in the Top and its rank given by the efficiency scores. However, the size of the banks plays a positive role on the cost efficiency of the institution, big banks having higher cost efficiencies than small banks. Conversely, the profit efficiency is equal across different sizes. Second, it verified that for 2005 - 2009 there is no evidence that banks from the developed countries are more efficient than banks from emerging economies. This finding is further supported by the third aspect, which shows that banks originating in the developed economies, with large exposures to more sophisticated banking products, have been hit the hardest by the financial crisis. However the banks managed to shrink their cost inefficiency while losing efficiency on the revenue side. The post crisis, 2009, proved to be a year in which banks across countries and regions converged in terms of efficiency and plateaued at about 10% and 25% for cost and profit inefficiency respectively.

This thesis investigates three major aspects of energy consumption rebound effects (RE) in three papers. More specifically, the issues addressed are (i) the magnitude of economy-wide rebound effect (ii) the role of energy policy instruments in mitigating it and (iii) its channels of impact. The research begins with the estimation of cross-country economy-wide rebound effects for a panel of 55 countries over the period 1980 to 2010. A two-stage approach is utilized in which energy efficiency is first estimated from a stochastic input distance frontier (SIDF). The estimated energy efficiency is then used in a second stage dynamic panel model to derive short-run and long-run RE for an array of developing and developed countries. The cross-country point estimates indicate substantial RE magnitudes across sampled countries during the period under consideration, although a positive and encouraging finding is the declining RE trend across most of the sampled countries during the study period. The second paper contains an RE benchmark for 19 EU countries, as well as an investigation of the effects of two energy policy instruments (energy taxes and ener-gy R&D) on RE performance over the period 1995 to 2010. The results indicate that RE performance improved over the sample period, reinforcing the results from paper one. In addition, there is also some evidence suggesting that binding market-based instruments such as energy taxes have been more effective in restricting RE than in-direct instruments such as energy R&D during the period under consideration. This is consistent across both estimated model specifications. An important observation from the first essay is the slightly larger average RE across the non-OECD countries. For this reason, the last empirical chapter evaluated the channels through which RE stimulated energy use across productive sectors of major developing/emerging economies, namely Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia and China. To achieve this, the essay relied on duality theory to decompose changes in energy demand into substitution and output effects through the estimation of a trans-log cost function using data spanning 1995-2009. Findings reveal that energy use elasticities across sampled sectors/countries are dominated by substitution effects. One intriguing result that also emerges from this analysis is the role of economies of scale and factor accumulation, rather than technical progress, in giving rise to eco-nomic growth and energy consumption in these countries during the period under consideration.