The traditional predictor of technical inefficiency proposed by Jondrow, Lovell, Materov, and Schmidt (1982) is a conditional expectation. This chapter explores whether, and by how much, the predictor can be improved by using auxiliary information in the conditioning set. It considers two types of stochastic frontier models. The first type is a panel data model where composed errors from past and future time periods contain information about contemporaneous technical inefficiency. The second type is when the stochastic frontier model is augmented by input ratio equations in which allocative inefficiency is correlated with technical inefficiency. Compared to the standard kernel-smoothing estimator, a newer estimator based on a local linear random forest helps mitigate the curse of dimensionality when the conditioning set is large. Besides numerous simulations, there is an illustrative empirical example.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEssays in Honor of Subal Kumbhakar
PublisherEmerald Group Publishing Ltd.
Pages309-328
Number of pages20
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-83797-873-1
ISBN (Print)978-1-83797-874-8
DOIs
StatePublished - 5 Apr 2024

Publication series

NameAdvances in Econometrics
Volume46

    Research areas

  • Stochastic frontier analysis, copulas, inefficiency scores, local random forest, machine learning, nonparametrics, synthetic data

ID: 128545268