Econometric Analysis of Firm-level Production Data

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore a variety of methods for the econometric analysis of firm-level production data. Three distinct approaches are considered, namely i) proxy variable methods of controlling for unobservable productivity, ii) data envelopment techniques for estimating the boundary of a production set, and iii) stochastic frontier methods for estimating the productive inefficiency of firms. Much of the focus is on semiparametric and nonparametric estimators that allow for a highly flexible specification of the function that relates input combinations to output quantities.