Prof. Dr. Uwe Cantner

Final exam (ca. 60 %), presentation or take-homes or mid term exams (ca. 40 %). The decision on the chosen form of examination is made at the beginning of the course in consultation with the students, considering the organizational framework conditions. The exact weighting of the individual assessments will be announced at the beginning of the course. Both parts need to be passed individually and the final grade is the weighted sum of individual grades. If students need to repeat the exam, a passed part need not to be retaken.

English

Basic knowledge in production theory

684 M.Sc. Economics, 276 M.Sc. Wirtschaftsmathematik: Wahlpflichtmodul

Lecture (2h per week), Exercise (2h per week)

The module deals with the methodological foundations and the application of various methods of productivity and efficiency measurement. Based on their production theoretic foundations index numbers, stochastic frontier analysis and data envelopment analysis are covered. Productivity differences are decomposed into several components such as pure technical efficiency, scale efficiency and allocative efficiency. Productivity decomposition formulae and the Malmquist index to analyze the sources of productivity change are also explained. All methods are applied to real data problems using freely available software packages.

Students have a sound understanding of production theory and the measurement of productivity and efficiency. They have a good command of the formal and empirical tools to apply these methods to real data and are able to interpret the results.