The Palgrave Handbook of Economic Performance Analysis

1. Introduction- William H. Greene and Thijs ten Raa -- 2. Micro foundations of earnings differences- Tirthatanmoy Das and Solomon W. Polachek -- 3. Performance: The output/input ratio- Thijs ten Raa -- 4. R&D, innovation and productivity- Pierre Mohnen -- 5. The choice of comparable DMUs and environmental variables- John Ruggiero -- 6. Data Envelopment Analysis with alternative returns to scale- Subhash Ray -- 7. Ranking methods within Data Envelopment Analysis- Nicole Adler and Nicola Volta -- 8. Distributional forms in Stochastic Frontier Analysis- Alexander D. Stead, Phill Wheat, and William H. Greene -- 9. Stochastic frontier models for discrete output variables- Eduardo Fe -- 10. Nonparametric statistical analysis of production- Camilla Mastromarco, Leopold Simar, and Paul W. Wilson -- 11. Bayesian performance evaluation- Mike G. Tsionas -- 12. Common methodological choices in parametric and non-parametric analyses of firms' performance- Luis Orea/Jose Zofio -- 13. Pricing inputs and outputs: Market prices versus shadow prices, market power, and welfare analysis- Aditi Bhattacharyya, Levent Kutlu, and Robin C. Sickles -- 14. Aggregation of individual efficiency measures and productivity indices- Andreas Mayer and Valentin Zelenyuk -- 15. Intermediate inputs and industry studies: Input-Output Analysis- Victoria Shestalova -- 16. Modelling environmental adjustments of production technologies: A literature review- K. Hervé Dakpo and Frederic Ang -- 17. An overview of issues in measuring the performance of national economies- Anthony Glass, Karligash Kenjegalieva, Robin C Sickles, and Thomas Weyman-Jones -- 18. Productivity indexes and national statistics: Theory, methods and challenges- W. Erwin Diewert and Kevin J. Fox. .

This Handbook takes an econometric approach to the foundations of economic performance analysis. The focus is on the measurement of efficiency, productivity, growth and performance. These concepts are commonly measured residually and difficult to quantify in practice. In real-life applications, efficiency and productivity estimates are often quite sensitive to the models used in the performance assessment and the methodological approaches adopted by the analysis. The Palgrave Handbook of Performance Analysis discusses the two basic techniques of performance measurement – deterministic benchmarking and stochastic benchmarking – in detail, and addresses the statistical techniques that connect them. All chapters include applications and explore topics ranging from the output/input ratio to productivity indexes and national statistics.