Global and local technical changes: a new decomposition of the Malmquist productivity index using virtual units

In estimating productivity change over time, technical change is frequently miscalculated as the geometric average of technological changes between two periods based on firm-specific information in the dataset. However, the frontier shift over time is a global phenomenon linked to relative technolog...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Aparicio, Juan, Santín González, Daniel
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositorio:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/102424
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/102424
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:C43
D24
O47
Productivity change
Malmquist index
Global technical change
Local technical change
Unit hypercube
Virtual units
Economía
Investigación operativa (Matemáticas)
5307.15 Teoría Microeconómica
1207 Investigación Operativa
Descripción
Sumario:In estimating productivity change over time, technical change is frequently miscalculated as the geometric average of technological changes between two periods based on firm-specific information in the dataset. However, the frontier shift over time is a global phenomenon linked to relative technological progress or regress across the entire frontiers. In this paper, we fill this gap by determining the technical change using synthetic observations generated at random within a unit hypercube and calculating the distances between them and the two frontiers being evaluated. Accordingly, we propose a decomposition of the Malmquist index's traditional technical change into two components: average global technical change, which is shared by all production units, and local technical change, which captures how each firm experiences global technical change. In this way, our approach establishes a new research avenue in production economics based on using randomly generated virtual points to assess overall phenomena.