2019 CEPA workshop on performance measurement

Title: Performance Measurement and Regulation of Electricity Businesses in Australia

Speaker: Tim Coelli

Firm-level panel data on Australian businesses are used to calculate productivity indices using  multilateral Törnqvist index number methods, and cost function models using stochastic frontier analysis and least squares regression methods. These various models provide efficient benchmarks for the Australian businesses, which are then used to inform deliberations regarding regulated prices.This presentation describes joint work commissioned by the Australian Energy Regulator to assist them with their deliberations regarding the setting of efficient price caps for the services provided by regulated electricity Distribution Network Service Providers (DNSPs) and Transmission Network Service Providers (TNSPs) in Australia.

Title: Structural macroeconomic inference from multivariate time series data

Speaker: Eric Eisenstat

A main focus of my current recent agenda is developing time series econometric methods aimed at obtaining structural inference from macroeconomic data. Such methods are important for policy development because they allow for data-driven inference regarding the response of the economy to policy and other types of shocks that is robust to specific modelling assumptions inherent to theoretical models.  To be useful, however, time series models must be aligned with macroeconomic theory in a general sense. This talk provides an overview of the link between multivariate time series econometric methods and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, which are most relevant for policy work.  It turns out that the essential concepts emerging from this research are also applicable to other fields such as marketing.

Title: Environmental efficiency & productivity: materials balance approach

Speaker: Vincent Hoang

This presentation provides an overview of a variety of recently developed approaches to measuring environmental efficiency and productivity using the material balance framework. These approaches have been used to conduct empirical analysis of trade-offs between environmental and economic performance in such sectors as agriculture and energy.

Title: On nonparametric socioeconomic health inequality comparisons

Speaker: Mohammad Khaled

Socioeconomic health inequality refers to the existence of inequalities in the distribution of health outcomes by income or socioeconomic status. Different nonparametric measures of both relative and absolute health inequality will be presented along with the details of their Inferential framework.

Title: Structural Analysis for Policy Recommendations under Uncertainty.

Speaker: Dong-Hyuk Kim

My research theme is to develop structural methods to draw policy recommendations in the presence of uncertainty. The research theme lies in the core of economics and many other related areas including marketing and corporate finance. It has mostly focused on empirical auction design, but the research agenda includes analyses of oligopolistic markets and mergers and acquisitions among others.

Title: Environmental Indices: Measuring Emissions and Vulnerability

Speaker: Knox Lovell

We use DEA to construct quantity index numbers of nations' greenhouse gas emissions in one project, and nations' vulnerability to various dimensions of climate change in another project. Both quantity index numbers differ conceptually, if not empirically, from popular measures.

Title: Causality in Applied Economics

Speaker: Rigissa Megalokonomou

In this talk, I will discuss a number of work-in-progress projects. All these projects have the common purpose of estimating causal effects in applied economics, mainly in the sector of education, but also in courts and immigration. I will cover a variety of topics, such as a new way to calculate teachers gender bias in education, the importance of teacher quality measured by teacher value-added models for long term outcomes, gender peer effects in classrooms, human capital depreciation for teachers who experience a period of unemployment, the relationship between exposure to refugees and crime incidents in the destination regions, gender interactions in supreme court when the allocation of a case to a judge is random, etc. All those projects discuss highly policy relevant questions.

Title: An Economic Approach to Measuring and Explaining Managerial Performance

Speaker: Chris O’Donnell

Most, if not all, measures of managerial performance can be viewed as measures of productivity and/or efficiency.  I will discuss a new and coherent approach to measuring and explaining productivity and efficiency change.  Among other things, I will (a) represent production technologies using period-and-environment-specific sets and functions, (b) explain how to compute measures of output and input quantity change (and therefore productivity change) in ways that are consistent with measurement theory, and (c) explain how various piecewise, deterministic and stochastic frontier models can be used to decompose proper productivity index numbers into measures of technical change, environmental change and various measures of technical, scale and mix efficiency change.

Title: Courts of Justice: Processing Times Efficiency

Speaker: Antonio Peyrache

In this study we look into the efficiency of courts of justice from several perspectives. First, we will focus on the specification of inputs and outputs to be used in the "production" of justice and the structure of production as a network model. Second, we will make a connection of the production model to the metric that policy makers have most widely used in the past to assess the performance of justice: processing times. Finally, we will discuss how to implement a "growth accounting" approach to model the differences in processing times across different courts and in time. These methodological discussions are the product of current empirical research into the efficiency of Italian courts of justice and their comparison with Swedish courts of Justice (as a part of a wider long term project that is aiming at implementing a comparison of all European countries and potentially OECD countries). We highlight how to make a comparison among different systems and discuss how this comparison may improve dramatically the associated empirical findings.

Title: Local Government Regulation and the Dynamics of Housing Prices

Speaker: Alicia Rambaldi

The talk will cover recent and ongoing work on modelling the regulatory effect of local planning authorities on the dynamics of housing prices in a metropolitan area.

Title: Comparable Economic Aggregates Across Countries

Speaker: D.S. Prasada Rao (Alicia Rambaldi)

Comparing economic measures of consumption, investment and income across countries involves measuring and accounting for movements in the prices of a goods and services within each economy and their relationship to those of other economies. This is achieved by using purchasing power parity exchange rates.  There are a number of areas where these measures are needed including measuring poverty and inequality.  Australia makes strategic decisions on foreign aid distribution (e.g. the Asia-Pacific region). These decisions require accurate measurements of these economies.

Title: Network econometrics with an application to healthcare

Speaker: Chris Rose

The talk will cover methodological work on the identification of peer effects, instrumental variables estimators and an application to surgeons’ treatment decisions in the NHS

Title: High dimensional macro econometric modelling

Speaker: Rodney Strachan

In this talk, I outline a number of recent projects at various stages of development all having the common theme or purpose of modelling large systems of macroeconomic variables. A number of the projects aim to provide inference on the evolution of processes while others try to relax the structure imposed to mitigate the impact of the model specification upon conclusions.

Title: Formality Avoidance: Evidence from Notches in China's Value-Added Taxes

Speaker: Haishan Yuan

Under China's value-added tax (VAT) system, firms with revenue above a certain threshold are mandated to register as a general VAT payer. Small (non-general) firms are restricted from claiming VAT credit from the input and issuing VAT invoices, but they are subject to lower tax rates. Using a novel administrative data set, we find substantial bunching just below the revenue cutoffs, which suggests that marginal firms refrain from formalizing in the VAT system by lowering their reported revenue. Among manufacturing firms, areas with a larger share of small firms exhibit a greater degree of bunching just below the registration threshold. We do not find a similar pattern for trading companies. Our results suggest that formality avoidance by small firms have important implications for the practical implementation of VAT. Moreover, network externality in VAT formalization may be particularly significant among manufacturing firms.

Title: Productivity, Efficiency, Aggregation, Optimization, Forecasting of Economic Recessions via Nonparametric Discrete Choice Modelling

Speaker: Valentin Zelenuyk

In this presentation I try to summarize my research work in the last 20 years. While it is mainly focusing on many aspects of productivity and efficiency analysis (80%) as well as nonparametric modelling of the discrete variables (for the regressand or regressors) with applications to e.g. forecasting of economic recessions, it turns out that all these works can be viewed through the prism of `Aggregation Problem with Constrained Optimization'.