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Unobserved Heterogeneity and International Benchmarking in Public Transport

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  • Astrid Cullmann
  • Mehdi Farsi
  • Massimo Filippini

Abstract

We analyze the technical efficiency of German and Swiss urban public transport companies by means of SFA. In transport networks we might face different network structures or complexities, not observed, but influencing the production process. The unobserved factors are typically modeled as separable factors. However, we argue that the entire production process is organized around different network structures. Therefore, they are inevitably non-separable from the observed inputs and outputs. The adopted econometric model is a random coefficient stochastic frontier model. We estimate an input distance function for the years 1991 to 2006. The results underline the presence of unobserved non-separable factors.

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File URL: http://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.345163.de/dp960.pdf
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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research in its series Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin with number 960.

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Length: 32 p.
Date of creation: 2009
Date of revision:
Publication status: Published in: Journal of Transport Economics and Policy 46 (2012), 1, 51-66
Handle: RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp960

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