Customer Reviews

Stochastic Frontier Analysis

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There are a number of good books on productivity analysis, an extremely practical topic in academia and industry. This book focuses on stochastic frontiers, a method that requires a number of assumptions. For instance, if you are an engineer, you can profit from modeling using different distribution assumptions about the nature of your productivity differentials. If you are an economist, you are less enthusiastic about the rigidity of a frontier analysis.
One excellent feature of this book is that the theory is well labelled, so that in two minutes, you can find the topic you want. The problem is that the depth of the theory is not sufficiently covered in the book --you need access to journal articles. The book is not a user guide or textbook: it is a theory book with good breadth. Good for the shelf, if accompanied by statistics and econometrics textbooks.

This book pulls together nearly every aspect of stochastic frontier models that you could ever need or want to learn about and puts it all together for the reader. The layout is remarkably well thought out and the methodology and estimators are clearly and rigorously teased out from a variety of sources, handily compiled into this one remarkable book.

You get it all in here, theory, methods, application, pitfalls, limitations, specification testing, both time series and cross sectional, you name it and this book has it. You will be able to find your way whether you've never used stochastic frontiers before or have done even advanced models of these production functions. There is something here for anyone and everyone interested in stochastic frontiers and you will NOT be disappointed by this book. It is simply outstanding and is a STEAL at the price it is offered at. Get it now!

I have been working on stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) for the last 6 years and this book is one of the best books that I have seen in the area. Both writers are top notch in this area. Indeed, Prof. Lovell is one of the founders of SFA. The book clearly explains the subjects and is a very good literature review. I feel that the writers utilized their own papers a lot which is fine as they already have done a lot in the area. My only complain about the paper is that it has a few critical typos in the formulas. These are small issues that can easily be fixed.

To sum up: I learned a lot from this book and it is a great book to have in the library for those who work on SFA. Indeed, it is my favorite book in the field.