Persistent and Transient Productive Inefficiency: A Maximum Simulated Likelihood Approach

Massimo Filippini and William Greene

No 14/197, CER-ETH Economics working paper series from CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich

Abstract: The productive efficiency of a firm can be seen as composed of two parts, one persistent and one transient. The received empirical literature on the measurement of productive efficiency has paid relatively little attention to the difference between these two components. Ahn, Good and Sickles (2000) suggested some approaches that pointed in this direction. The possibility was also raised in Greene (2004), who expressed some pessimism over the possibility of distinguishing the two empirically. Recently, Colombi (2010) and Kumbhakar and Tsionas (2012), in a milestone extension of the stochastic frontier methodology have proposed a tractable model based on panel data the promises to provide separate estimates of the two components of efficiency. The approach developed in the original presentation proved very cumbersome actually to implement in practice. Colombi (2010) notes that FIML estimation of the model is ‘complex and time consuming.’ In the sequence of papers, Colombi (2010), Colombi et al. (2011, 2014), Kumbhakar, Lien and Hardaker (2012) and Kumbhakar and Tsionas (2012) have suggested other strategies, including a four step least squares method. The main point of this paper is that full maximum likelihood estimation of the model is neither complex nor time consuming. The extreme complexity of the log likelihood noted in Colombi (2010), Colombi et al. (2011, 2014) is reduced by using simulation and exploiting the Butler and Moffitt (1982) formulation. In this paper, we develop a practical full information maximum simulated likelihood estimator for the model. The approach is very effective and strikingly simple to apply, and uses all of the sample distributional information to obtain the estimates. We also implement the panel data counterpart of the JLMS (1982) estimator for technical or cost inefficiency. The technique is applied in a study of the cost efficiency of Swiss railways.

Keywords: productive efficiency; stochastic frontier analysis; panel data; transient and persistent efficiency. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C23 D2 D24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm, nep-eff and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Persistent and transient productive inefficiency: a maximum simulated likelihood approach (2016)
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