Labour‐use efficiency in Swedish social insurance offices
提出一种多阶段方法估计面板数据中的前沿生产函数，并分解技术无效率为时间不变、时变和残差部分。基于1974-84年瑞典地方社会保险办公室的大面板数据，发现劳动力使用效率差异大且均值随时间下降，多数办公室规模不经济。
Abstract This paper considers the estimation of frontier production functions in panel data models. It proposes a multi‐stage method to obtain estimates of (1) the parameters of a flexible input requirement function and (2) technical inefficiency decomposed into time‐invariant (firm‐specific), time‐varying, and the residual components. The proposed method is used to analyse labour‐use efficiency of Swedish local social insurance offices on the basis of a large panel of observations during the time period 1974–84. Empirical results show: (1) substantial variations in labour‐use efficiency among these offices, with the mean efficiencies declining over time; (2) presence of economies of scale, thereby meaning that most of the offices were of suboptimal size.