Anthony Glass

The University of Sheffield | Sheffield · Management School

Privatised water companies in England and Wales are subject to economic regulation by the industry regulator (Ofwat). Ofwat sets 5-year caps on the prices companies can charge their customers. These caps are in part based on the benchmarking of companies’ costs. Ofwat has not previously used econometrics to benchmark domestic retail costs, but it u...

We address the question of: 'how many deaths in England and Wales are due to COVID-19?' There are two approaches to measuring COVID deaths - 'COVID associated deaths' and 'excess deaths'. An excess deaths type framework is preferable, as there is substantial measurement error in COVID associated deaths, due to issues relating to the identification...

Privatised water companies in England and Wales are subject to economic regulation by the industry regulator (Ofwat). Ofwat sets 5-year caps on the prices companies can charge their customers. These caps are in part based on the benchmarking of companies’ costs. Ofwat has not previously used econometrics to benchmark domestic retail costs, but it u...

This paper makes three diverse contributions. First, whereas the extant literature estimates a single elasticity of substitution/complementarity from an input distance function, we calculate a range of elasticities. Second, we make a substantive contribution to the literature on bank input substitution/complementarity because somewhat surprisingly...

The principal contribution of this paper is to present the first method to sift through a large number of firms in an industry to uncover which firms act as large spatial total factor productivity (TFP) growth centers. We define a large spatial TFP growth center as a firm that is a large net generator of spatial TFP growth spillovers, i.e., it is a...

The literature on bank scale economies focuses on the familiar type of returns to scale that are internal to the firm. Using a spatial approach, we analyze returns to scale for banks that are made up of external (i.e., spillover) economies. We extend ray-scale economies (RSE), expansion-path scale economies (EPSE) and expansion-path subadditivity (...

An interesting strand of the theoretical literature on measuring competition posits that when competition increases in an industry, output is reallocated to more efficient firms. Our first contribution is on the methodology for the empirical implementation of this theoretical test of a change in competition. This contribution moves from the relatio...

Urban commercial banks are regional banks which have gained tremendous importance in the last two decades in China. There is, however, a lack of research on regional banking, especially on the Chinese regional banking industry. Therefore, using an innovative spatial approach, this paper investigates the efficiency of 65 Chinese urban commercial ban...

We present the methodology for a new spatial decomposition of total factor productivity (TFP) growth. The relevant literature is underdeveloped as there is just one short study which proposes a partial spatial TFP growth decomposition. We develop this literature in four respects. The first two developments are methodological to go from a partial de...

Previous studies of industry level energy demand have not accounted for the hierarchical nesting of industries within a system that also adequately allows for country specific determinants of energy demand. The principal contribution of this paper is therefore to analyse energy demand for European industries over the period 1995–2009 using a dynami...

Energy consumption and greenhouse emissions across many countries have increased overtime despite widespread energy efficiency improvements. One explanation offered in the literature is the rebound effect (RE), however there is a debate about its magnitude and the appropriate model for estimating it. Using a combined stochastic frontier analysis (S...

Energy plays an important role within the production technology of fast emerging economies, such that firms' reaction to changes in energy prices provides useful information on factor productivity and factor intensity, as well as the likely outcome of energy policy initiatives, among other things. Drawing on duality theory, this paper decomposes ch...

We extend the emerging literature on spatial frontier models in three respects. Firstly, we account for latent heterogeneity by developing a maximum likelihood random effects spatial autoregressive (SAR) stochastic frontier model. Secondly, to analyze the finite sample properties of a spatial stochastic frontier model we develop a Monte Carlo exper...

Drawing on a recent development on the interpretation of spatial econometric models, we extend two classic characteristics of production (returns to scale and diminishing marginal productivity of factor inputs) to the spatial case. In the context of a spatial translog production function we define internal (i.e., direct), external (i.e., indirect),...

By blending seminal literature on non-spatial stochastic frontier models with key contributions to spatial econometrics we develop a spatial autoregressive (SAR) stochastic frontier for panel data. The specification of the SAR frontier allows efficiency to vary over time and across the cross-sections. Efficiency is calculated from a composed error...

It is common in efficiency studies which analyse the environment for pollution to form part of the production technology. Pollution therefore affects efficiency and the TFP growth decomposition. As an alternative approach we draw on theoretical studies from the environmental economics literature, which demonstrate that TFP affects environmental qua...

We exploit the natural distinction between the attacking and defensive aspects of tennis to get a better understanding of the origins of relative inefficiency. Attacking is simply when a player is serving and defending is when a player is returning serve. We use data envelopment analysis to compute the attacking, defensive and overall efficiencies...

During the first phase of the financial crisis in 2008/09, after Iceland and Belgium, Kazakhstan experienced the most significant bank failures as a share of bank system assets. Using rich monthly data for virtually the entire Kazakh banking industry for the period March 2007–December 2010, Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) is used to fit several...

We estimate efficiency and TFP growth for two measures of congestion and two measures of the monetary value of congestion for the largest 88 contiguous cities in the U.S. over the period 1982–2007. Using stochastic frontier analysis we find that the efficiency scores for congestion and the associated ranking of cities is sensitive to the measure of...

In this paper we extend the tests of the monotonicity and concavity of a non-spatial translog production function to the case where there is spatial autoregressive dependence. The tests are then applied using data for 40 European countries over the period 1995-2008.

A new spatial decomposition of TFP growth into direct (own) and indirect (spillover) components is set out. We then apply the decomposition in the context of a spatial autoregressive production frontier analysis of 40 European countries over the period 1995-2008.

In this paper we merge techniques from the efficiency literature with spatial econometric techniques. In particular, we combine calculation of efficiency from the unit speci…c effects with the spatial lag model to develop a spatial autoregressive frontier model for panel data. Features of the modeling include time-varying efficiency and estimation...

It is common in fi…rm level environmental efficiency studies for pollution to form part of the production technology. We omit nitrogen and sulphur emissions from the spatial analysis of production in European countries (1995 - 2008) because we …find they are not signi…cant inputs. Efficiency and TFP growth from the production analysis are then used...

Forming Railtrack was a key part of the privatisation of British Rail (BR). Railtrack took over ownership of BR's fixed infrastructure in April 1994 and its parent company, the Railtrack Group, was floated in May 1996 on the London Stock Exchange. Despite the group posting some excellent financial results in the early years, Railtrack's record on i...

The analysis begins by using annual data for the US from 1959 to 2003 to examine the macroeconomic relationship between government expenditure on public order and safety, output and investment. In practice, total spending on public order and safety is divided up into four categories (police force, fire service, law courts and prison service) so in...

The analysis begins by examining the macroeconomic relationship between public expenditure on transport and output/investment in the US using annual data for the period 1959-2003. In practice, public expenditure on transport is divided up into four categories (waterways, public transit and the railroads, aviation and highways) so in the second part...