Working Paper

ABSTRACT

We apply the adaptive LASSO (Zou, 2006) to select a set of maximally efficient firms in the panel fixed-effect stochastic frontier model. The adaptively weighted L₁ penalty with sign restrictions for firm-level inefficiencies allows simultaneous estimation of the maximal efficiency and firm-level inefficiency parameters, which results in a faster rate of convergence of the corresponding estimators than the least-squares dummy variable approach.  We show that the estimator possesses the oracle property and selection consistency still holds with our proposed tuning parameter selection criterion. We also propose an efficient optimization algorithm based on coordinate descent. We apply the method to estimate a group of efficient police officers who are best at detecting contraband in motor vehicle stops (i.e. search efficiency) in Syracuse, NY.