Digital Commons Network^™

A Data Envelopment Analysis Of West Virginia School Districts, Eduardo Minuci, Amir B. Ferreira Neto, Joshua Hall

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

West Virginia schools are consistently below the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Using Data Envelopment Analysis, we estimate the technical efficiency of West Virginia school districts. We find less variation in technical efficiency in West Virginia than in similar studies conducted in other states. This appears to be because of state policy imposing homogeneity of input usage. Due to the limited variation in technical efficiency across districts, we cannot analyze how non-school inputs such as socioeconomic factors affect technical efficiency across districts. Summary statistics organized by county economic status, however, suggest that socioeconomic status plays a …

Adaptive Economic And Ecological Forest Management Under Risk, Joseph Buongiorno, Mo Zhou

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Background

Forest managers must deal with inherently stochastic ecological and economic processes. The future growth of trees is uncertain, and so is their value. The randomness of low-impact, high frequency or rare catastrophic shocks in forest growth has significant implications in shaping the mix of tree species and the forest landscape. In addition, the fluctuations of wood prices influence greatly forest revenues.

Methods

Markov decision process models (MDPs) offer a rigorous and practical way of developing optimum management strategies, given these multiple sources of risk.

Results

Examples illustrate how such management guidelines are obtained with MDPs for combined ecological and …