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.

Ao longo dos últimos anos tem se observado no mundo uma expansão do setor leiteiro. Parte dessa expansão se deve a novas tecnologias que foram adotadas nas últimas décadas, mas também ocorreu por causa da queda, ou da anulação de barreiras comerciais. Contudo, notou-se também uma queda no número de fazendas leiteiras. Sendo o leite uma commodity os preços seguem as oscilações de mercado - oferta e demanda - e nenhum dos agentes possui poder para influenciar nos preços de compra e venda dessa mercadoria. Como os boletins do CEPEA mostram, os preços no ano passado têm-se mantido abaixo da média histórica, referente à última década, mas os termos de troca com relação a quantidade de litros de leite para se comprar insumos e defensivos se mantêm em patamares estáveis com tendência de alta. Tendo em vista esse problema, surge a necessidade de buscar compreender melhor como funciona o sistema de produção do setor leiteiro. Este trabalho satisfatoriamente conseguiu detectar através das fronteiras estocásticas de produção simples - leite como único produto de saída - e multi-output - leite e outros produtos animais existentes nas fazendas - além da regressão quantílica para análise de quantis variados da produção de leite, quais os insumos utilizados pelos produtores que oferecem melhores retornos para sua produção bem como analisar fatores de eficiência (BATTESE, COELLI; 1995; CHIDMI; SOLÍS; CABRERA, 2011). Os resultados apresentados apontam para a necessidade de se levar em consideração a inter-relação entre os insumos considerados - função de produção translog - e identificaram os insumos referentes ao capital - quantidade de vacas ordenhadas e gastos com máquinas e equipamentos - e ao trabalho - gastos com salários - como principais insumos da atividade pecuária. Os gastos com medicamentos animais, com energia elétrica e a área disponível para a atividade pecuária se mostraram contraproducentes indicando mau uso ou uso excessivo desses fatores, além de ressaltar a importância do capital na pecuária. Em geral, para quase todos os modelos testados, a produção leiteira apresentou retornos constantes à escala e nível de eficiência em torno de 88% em média para as fronteiras estocásticas e 90% para as estimativas feitas com regressão quantílica. Entre os fatores de eficiência identificados estão a capacidade de armazenamento de silos e tanques de refrigeração para o leite e a margem bruta líquida obtida com a atividade. Os fatores de ineficiência identificados são a prática de queimadas e o percentual de mulheres na administração das unidades produtivas. Com relação aos variados modelos estimados percebeu-se, em suma, a necessidade de se intensificar a produção pecuária e de melhorar a infraestrutura das fazendas. / Over the past few years it has been observed in the world an expansion of the dairy industry. Part of this expansion is due to new technologies that have been adopted in recent decades, but also because of the fall, or the annulment of trade barriers. However, it has also been noted a drop in the number of dairy farms. Being a commodity, milk prices follow the market oscillations - supply and demand - and none of the agents has enough power to influence buying and selling prices of this commodity. As the CEPEA bulletins show, prices last year have remained below the historical average for the last decade, but the terms of trade regarding the amount of liters of milk to buy inputs and pesticides at levels remain stable with uptrend. In view of this problem, there is the need to get a better understanding of how the dairy sector production system works. This work satisfactorily managed to detect, through the single-output stochastic production frontier method - value of milk production as output - and multi-output - value of milk and other existing animal products at the farms - besides quantile regression analysis for multiple production quantiles, which inputs used by farmers offer the best outcome for their production as well as analyzing efficiency factors (BATTESE; COELLI, 1995; CHIDMI; SOLÍS; CABRERA, 2011). The estimated results pointed to the need of considering the interrelation of considered inputs - translog production function - and identified the capital related inputs - quantity of milked cows and expenditure on machinery and equipment - and work related inputs - expenditure on wages - as main production inputs. Expenditure on animal drugs and on electricity and the area available for livestock activity proved counterproductive indicating misuse or overuse of these factors, in addition to emphasizing the importance of capital in livestock. In general, for most of the tested models, dairy production showed constant returns to scale and an average efficiency level of 88% for stochastic frontier models and 90% for estimates done using quantile regression. Among the identified efficiency factors are the storage capacity of silos and cooling tanks for milk and the net gross margin with activity. The identified inefficiency factors are the practice of burning and the percentage of women in the management of production units. With regard to various models estimated it was realized, in short, the need to intensify livestock production and to improve the infrastructure of the farms.

Recent developments in microsimulation modeling of activity and travel demand have called for the explicit recognition of time-space constraints under which individuals perform their activity and travel patterns. The estimation of time-space prism vertex locations, i.e., the perceived time constraints, is an important development in this context. Stochastic frontier modeling methodology offers a suitable framework for modeling and identifying the expected vertex locations of time space prisms within which people execute activity-travel patterns. In this work, stochastic frontier models of time space prism vertex locations are estimated for samples drawn from a household travel survey conducted in 2001 in the city of Thane on the west coast of India and National Household Travel Survey 2001, United States. This offers an opportunity to study time constraints governing activity travel patterns of individuals in a developing as well as developed country context. The work also includes comparisons between males and females, workers and non-workers, and developed and developing country contexts to better understand how socio-economic and socio-cultural norms and characteristics affect time space prism constraints. It is found that time space prism constraints in developing country data set can be modeled using the stochastic frontier modeling methodology. It is also found that significant differences exist between workers and non-workers and between males and females,possibly due to the more traditional gender and working status roles in the Indian context. Finally, both differences and similarities were noticed when comparisons were made between results obtained from the data set of India and United States. Many of these differences can be explained by the presence of other constraints including institutional, household, income, and transportation accessibility constraints that are generally significantly greater in the developing country context.

This study veers from the traditional perspective of examining school efficiency or productivity as a cost minimizing process, in which educational inputs are minimized to achieve maximum outputs (student performance). Instead, it provides a critical examination of the dominant, cost minimizing assumption associated with efficiency models and suggest schools instead behave similarly to budget maximizers as presented in Niskanen’s (1971) seminal budget maximizing framework. The study examines the relationship between total student expenditures and subsequent student outcomes, establishing the relative efficiency of Texas school districts using stochastic frontier analysis within a budget-maximizing framework. Additionally, the study investigates how special education populations are structured within those districts deemed efficient or inefficient. The results of the study concluded that district efficient type did not result in different educational outcomes for students with disabilities. While analysis revealed that inefficient districts spend almost twice as much as efficient districts, no other significant differences were identified among districts type based on the percentage of students receiving special education or student performance. This study contributes to the growing need to identify more appropriate estimation techniques for measuring school productivity and how students with special needs should be included in the education productivity conversation.

Michael Porter於1991年首先對於以往環保政策會傷害廠商營運的論點提出反對的觀點，Porter認為環保政策可以刺激廠商進行創新及研發，最終將使廠商的營運情況提升，變得更有競爭力。Porter hypothesis(PH)提出之後，許多學者便針對PH的主張進行實證研究，然而至今學者間對於PH的存在與否仍無明確的共識。然而PH的主張對於像是中國大陸等發展中的國家尤為重要，而中國近期的十二五計畫亦將經濟發展及環境保護放在同等重要的位置，因此驗證PH是否成立以了解環保政策對於廠商及至國家經濟發展的影響則有助於政策的制定。本研究以實證分析的方式研究PH的主張是否存在於廠商的生產效率之中，並試圖找出造成過去實證研究矛盾的可能因素。本研究使用中國大陸的面板資料，分析模型對環保政策及廠商生產效率進行分析。

Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan

Flourishing economy, rapid industrialization and increasing trend of motorization have been shaping societies in the developing countries like India in an unprecedented manner.Infrastructure backlog amid such rapid growth in all imaginable directions has heavily exacerbated the urban transport crisis in these countries by alarming increase in vehicular travel demand, road fatalities, and environmental pollution. To address urban transport challenges, the necessary development and implementation of effective transport planning and policies have generally lagged in the developing countries compared to that seen in the developed countries due to several constraints including resource constraints, knowledge constraints, institutional constraints and so on. However, in the recent past, with the rapid development seen by several emerging economies and the explosive growth in transportation infrastructure investment, there is a growing interest in the development and implementati on of advanced travel demand modeling systems in developing countries. But lack of necessary research and exploration of travel behavior in a developing country context has left very limited knowledge for us to understand the extent of applicability of these advanced theories and methodologies in a different socio-cultural perspective. Assessing the practical relevance of the subject, this research adopts a comprehensive approach to explore the activity engagement pattern and time use behavior from a developing country standpoint. To accomplish this goal, a series of empirical and analytical studies are performed on a household travel survey data set available from Thane Metropolitan Area in India. The study also introduces new concepts and facilitates enhancements of existing modeling methodologies in the field of travel behavior and time use research. The study results provide very insightful findings and plausible interpretations consistent with a developing country perspective reco gnizing a wide spectrum of differences and similarities in activity patterns and time use behavior between a developed and a developing country. Specified model structures are meaningfully able to incorporate various socio-cultural and institutional constraints and reflected sensitivity to the behavioral variability between the contexts suggesting that advanced analytical techniques may be satisfactorily applied on the data set from developing countries which may contribute important ingredients in the development of advanced activity-based model system in the countries like India.