Exploring horizontal mergers in Swedish district courts using technical and scale efficiency: rejecting convexity in favour of nonconvexity

Xiaoqing Chen, Kristiaan Kerstens and Qingyuan Zhu
Additional contact information
Xiaoqing Chen: NUIST - Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology
Qingyuan Zhu: NUAA - Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics [Nanjing]

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Swedish district courts have undergone a major mergers and acquisitions program between 2000 and 2010 to centralize activity in larger and fewer courts. The purpose of this contribution is to conduct an efficiency analysis of these courts to identify the eventual efficiency gains. Distinguishing mainly between technical and scale efficiency and determining the returns to scale of individual observations, we try to find the potential rationales behind this merger wave. We are to the best of our knowledge the first to combine traditional convex with nonconvex nonparametric frontier methods to calculate efficiency before and after the mergers. It turns out that the nonconvex methods provide a more cogent ex post explanation of this historical merger wave aimed at increasing the size of operations. A battery of recent test statistics rejects convexity in favour of nonconvexity.

Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis; Free Disposal Hull; Horizontal mergers; Technical efficiency; Scale efficiency. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-02-14
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05368965v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Annals of Operations Research, 2025, 351 (2), pp.1319-1351. ⟨10.1007/s10479-025-06508-9⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05368965v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Exploring horizontal mergers in Swedish district courts using technical and scale efficiency: rejecting convexity in favour of nonconvexity (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05368965

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-025-06508-9

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().