Efficacité et productivité d'une Industrie – EPI

The aim of this project is to develop and to apply methods to analyze both productivity growth and efficiency of the French food industry. The project is motivated by both theoretical and empirical questions. From the methodological point of view, the project deals with frontier estimation and efficiency measurement. One of the major difficulties in the application of nonparametric methods for frontier estimation is the dependence of the result to outliers or more generally the extreme sensitivity of the results to a small number of observations. Parametric models do not solve this problem and requires numerous non-testable assumptions. In order to address this question, robust nonparametric frontier estimation has been developed in Toulouse and is now used by many empirical researchers. Two methods have been developed: the m-frontier and the alpha-frontier. The latter is based on quantile estimation and the former on a regularization of the conditional extreme values. Several papers have been published on this topic by the team. The future developments of this field may be regrouped in the following points: - Non-parametric frontier estimation and panel data. The problem is to extend robust estimation to the case where several observations are available for each firm for different years. The major problem is to separate inefficiency and heterogeneity and we may propose a relevant model to address this question. - Asymptotic theory of robust estimation if the regularization parameter is function of the sample size. The main question is the existence of data driven selection of regularization parameter which preserve the asymptotic normality obtained when this parameter is fixed. - Evaluation of the relative production performance of firms: rather than choosing a radial distance to the production frontier based on either input or output orientation, which can result in poor evaluation of this performance, we will explore the possibility to measure the distance from a given firm to the frontier along a hyperbolic path. - Empirical studies of robust non-parametric frontier estimation. We plan to apply these techniques to data from the French food-processing industries. From an empirical point of view a special attention will be devoted to the French food industry. The issue is to better understand what explains the relative poor performance of the French food industry and in particular its low productivity gains over the 1996-2005 years.The development of an original database will allow comparing and testing the methods developed with existing methods. It will also allow producing more precise results about the productivity growth and the efficiency of firms in the food industry. In our knowledge, it will be the first time that a systematic analysis of productivity and efficiency in the French food industry will be conducted. We will first analyze the productivity growth of the different sectors of the food industry. The objective is to provide a comprehensive study of total factor productivity growth in different sectors of the French food-processing industry. The analysis will be conducted using a panel plant database. This allows distinguishing among sectors that could have experienced different patterns of productivity growth. Moreover, heterogeneity across plants in given sectors will be investigated. More technically, when estimating a production function using plant level data, two difficulties (at least) arise. They are linked to simultaneity bias and to a selection bias. We will use the most recent techniques to deal with these two important issues. In a second step, we will analyze the efficiency of firms on the food processing industries. In line with the first part of the project, we will focus on nonparametric analysis in the context of estimating production frontiers and recovering individual firm measures of relative performance in terms of technical efficiency. Special attention will be then devoted to the identification of exogenous factors that might affect firm's performance. In particular, we will also shed some light on the relationship between efficiency in the food industry and the increased pressure towards developing 'good' environmental practices in this sector. The impact of the investments made in order to comply with environmental regulation, on economic performance, productivity and efficiency of French firms is an empirical question which has not yet been addressed.