Are Trolley Buses in Athens and Piraeus technically efficient?

Panayotis Michaelides, Athena Belegri-Roboli, Theocharis Marinos and Kostas Kavouridis

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Reliable measures of technical efficiency are of great interest because they can assist in addressing important issues. For instance, inefficient operation of firms - in the sense that if a firm is inefficient it does not produce at minimum cost - could lead to higher prices which could drive costumers to substitute away toward some other product or service. The purpose of this paper is the estimation of technical efficiency of Trolley Buses of Athens & Piraeus Area (T.B.A.P.A.), for each one of its twenty (20) lines for the year 2003. We apply the methodological framework of Stochastic Frontier Analysis (S.F.A.), by using the Cobb- Douglas specification of the production function. The dependent variable is the total kilometers that are covered by the vehicles of each line, while the independent variables include the fleet of the vehicles used, labor expanded and energy expanded. The data set consists of the monthly observations of the twenty (20) lines of the APTB. The results are compared to those from Data Envelopment Analysis (D.E.A.), a particularly widely used approach for efficiency measurement in the literature. Findings suggest that most lines were highly efficient, since technical efficiency ranged between 97% and 100%. The results obtained by means of the SFA approach are, in general terms, consistent with the DEA findings, despite the fact that DEA usually cannot discriminate between inefficiency and noise and tends to provide overestimated results.

Keywords: Trolley Buses; Public Transportation; Technical Efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 D24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/74463/1/MPRA_paper_74463.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:74463

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().