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Identifying Technically Efficient Fishing Vessels: A Non-Empty, Minimal Subset Approach, Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, William Clinton Horrace, Kurt E. Schnier

Center for Policy Research

There is a growing resource economics literature, concerning the estimation of the technical efficiency of fishing vessels utilizing the stochastic frontier model. In these models, vessel output is regressed on a linear function of vessel inputs and a random composed error. Using parametric assumptions on the regression residual, estimates of vessel technical efficiency are calculated as the mean of a truncated normal distribution and are often reported in a rank statistic as a measure of a captain's skill and used to estimate excess capacity within fisheries. We demonstrate analytically that these measures are potentially flawed, and extend the results of …