Paul W. Wilson

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present new estimates of returns to scale for US banks based on nonparametric, local-linear estimation of bank cost, revenue, and profit functions.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present new estimates of returns to scale for U.S. banks based on nonparametric, local-linear estimation of bank cost, revenue and profit functions and compare the extent of scale economies in banking some six years after the financial crisis and four years after enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act with scale economies prior to the crisis.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a bootstrap method that gives confidence interval estimates based on sampling distributions, and which have good coverage properties that improve with sample size, and also find that a commonly-used Wald test used to test the existence of inefficiency has catastrophic size properties; likelihood-ratio and bootstrap tests are shown in Monte Carlo experiments to perform well both in terms of size and power.

TL;DR: This introduction to the special issue highlights the importance of measuring the efficiency of health care providers, provides a background on frontier techniques, contains an overview of the articles in the specialissue, and suggests a research agenda for DEA and SFA.

TL;DR: This paper examined the productivity of Federal Reserve check-processing offices during 1980-1999 using non-parametric estimation methods and newly developed methods for nonparametric inference and hypothesis testing, and found that median productivity improved substantially during the 1990s, and the dispersion of productivity across Fed offices declined.