Christopher J. O'Donnell

This book provides a coherent description of the main concepts and statistical methods used to analyse economic performance. The focus is on measures of performance that are of practical relevance to policy makers. Most, if not all, of these measures can be viewed as measures of productivity and/or efficiency. Linking fields as diverse as index number theory, data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis, the book explains how to compute measures of input and output quantity change that are consistent with measurement theory. It then discusses ways in which meaningful measures of productivity change can be decomposed into measures of technical progress, environmental change, and different types of efficiency change. The book is aimed at graduate students, researchers, statisticians, accountants and economists working in universities, regulatory authorities, government departments and private firms. The book contains many numerical examples. Computer codes and datasets areavailable on a companion website.

The second edition of this book has been written for the same audience as the first edition. It is designed to be a "first port of call" for people wishing to study efficiency and productivity analysis. The book provides an accessible introduction to the four principal methods involved: econometric estimation of average response models; index numbers; data envelopment analysis (DEA); and stochastic firontier analysis (SFA). For each method, we provide a detailed introduction to the basic concepts, give some simple numerical examples, discuss some of the more important extensions to the basic methods, and provide references for further reading. In addition, we provide a number of detailed empirical applications using real-world data. The book can be used as a textbook or as a reference text. As a textbook, it probably contains too much material to cover in a single semester, so most instructors will want to design a course around a subset of chapters. For example, Chapter 2 is devoted to a review of production economics and could probably be skipped in a course for graduate economics majors. However, it should prove useful to undergraduate students and those doing a major in another field, such as business management or health studies.

The second edition of this book has been written for the same audience as the first edition. It is designed to be a "first port of call" for people wishing to study efficiency and productivity analysis. The book provides an accessible introduction to the four principal methods involved: econometric estimation of average response models; index numbers; data envelopment analysis (DEA); and stochastic firontier analysis (SFA). For each method, we provide a detailed introduction to the basic concepts, give some simple numerical examples, discuss some of the more important extensions to the basic methods, and provide references for further reading. In addition, we provide a number of detailed empirical applications using real-world data. The book can be used as a textbook or as a reference text. As a textbook, it probably contains too much material to cover in a single semester, so most instructors will want to design a course around a subset of chapters. For example, Chapter 2 is devoted to a review of production economics and could probably be skipped in a course for graduate economics majors. However, it should prove useful to undergraduate students and those doing a major in another field, such as business management or health studies.

This work covers the maximal and prime ideals of the incidence algebra, derivations and isomorphisms, radicals and additional ring-theoretic properties. Combinatorial discussions include a study of the Mobius function, reduced incidence subalgebras, and the coalgebra approach to incidence algebras.;College or university bookstores may order five or more copies for a special student price, which is available on request from Marcel Dekker.