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Scholars in the areas of economics and educational administration have in recent years examined the relationship between educational cost and school size. One distinguishing characteristic of such studies has been the choice of a school or a school district as the unit of analysis. Another is the overwhelming choice of a parabolic function to describe the cost‐size relationship. This study examines the question whether the unit of analysis should be a specific program of study (such as mathematics or social studies), utilizing data collected from Michigan secondary schools for the school year 1971–1972. The data are also used to check whether a hyperbolic relationship between school size and costs provides a better statistical fit to the data. The Michigan data encompass both secondary academic and vocational programs.

1982 US intra‐industry trade (IIT) for 308 four‐digit manufacturing products is related to industry characteristics in a cross‐section regression study of the sources of two‐way trade. Results indicate the empirical relevance of models which present IIT as the result of international external economies in the production of differentiated producers goods. IIT as a means of satisfying consumers′ tastes for variety does not seem to be important, but oligopoly models of two‐way trade in consumer goods are supported owing to the association with concentration ratios. In contrast to recent studies which concluded that scale economies inhibit IIT in manufactured products, an examination of four different proxies for internal economies reveals that neither IIT nor inter‐industry trade based on comparative advantage is influenced significantly by scale effects, whether measured by size of establishment or by the productivity advantages of large plants.

This chapter explores the question – where is the economy? In taking up this question, I explore the action of economists in making the economy, framed in the place of ‘place’ in the economy and how the politics of economic data and calculation and boundaries make economies. In this way, I argue for a performative understanding of regional economics where the economy can be said to be made, often out of real things such as hospitals, factories, shops and schools, and infrastructure, but also out of social practices that echo out of the field of economics into institutions and ways of thinking calculatedly.

To make this case of this approach, and to grasp the slippery fish of where the economy is, I introduce autoethnographic materials from my experience of being a regional economic commentator, holding forth on the Waterford economy. These empirics relay the everyday methods of economic analysis as a material and political practice, alighting on the data, calculations and boundaries that go into making the economy. Here the curious relationship between the economist and their economy, the dancer and the dance come into view and how people, including myself, call an economy into being.

Currently, there is a dearth of research studies regarding macro analysis of the workforce productivity of the US construction industry. The purpose of this paper is to calculate the workforce productivity changes of the US construction industry from 2006 to 2016, with the number of laborers as input and value of construction industry as output.

The present study introduced the data envelopment analysis (DEA) based Malmquist productivity index model to measure the workforce productivity of the US construction industry from 2006 to 2016.

The results indicated that the workforce productivity of the US construction industry experienced a continuous decline, except for the increases from 2011 to 2013 and from 2014 to 2015. It was also shown that there were gaps in the workforce productivity development level among all states and nine regions in the US construction industry. Besides, the relationship between workforce productivity and four aspects, including real estate price, workforce, climate distribution and economic factors, was analyzed.

The calculation of the productivity of the US construction industry is based on the premise that the external environment is fixed and unchanged from 2006 to 2016, but the multi-level DEA model for further calculation is required for obtaining more effective conclusions.

This paper measures the workforce productivity of the US construction industry over the past 11 years, which added latest analysis and knowledge into the construction industry, providing decision-makers with advice and data support to formulate policies to improve workforce productivity.

This study provided both government decision-makers and industrial practitioners with important macro background environment information, which will facilitate the improvement of workforce productivity in the construction industry in different regions of the US.

The authors aim to provide here an opinion on the state‐of‐the‐art of integrated ecological‐economic assessments of bioenergy under climate change, as well as the challenges along with their implications faced in planning adaptation at local scale.

Investments to reduce emissions must be made in the coming decades to avoid the risks posed by climate change. If these investments are made wisely, then costs will be manageable, stability in markets as well as energy security will be achieved, and even rural development and economic growth may be stimulated. The authors call attention to the need for modeling of climate change impacts by combining the outputs from appropriately designed crop simulation models with economic analyses. Combining natural science and economics in a compatible fashion at local scale will play an essential role in advancing communication and information exchange.

There are key differences in drivers or determinants of mitigation and adaptation potential and decisions at different scales, which means that different actors, different timescales and different spatial scales of decision making must be specifically considered. Understanding of the potential impacts of climate change requires disaggregation of the agricultural sector with appropriate detail. A critical trade‐off exists between area‐wide spatial coverage and an explicit consideration of local peculiarities.

The authors suggest that a much stronger effort must be made to meld natural science crop modeling approaches with economic analyses, to include spatially explicit consideration of conventional crop production along with 1st and 2nd generation bioenergy crops, and the evaluation not only of “best guess” scenarios of change, but also potential system impacts of extreme scenarios.

This research estimates a multi-product flexible cost function of airport variable costs. Data for the analysis are a panel of 50 airports from 1996 to 2008. Output includes domestic and international departures, non-aeronautical operating revenues, and the number of transport workload units, where a workload unit is a passenger or the equivalent of a 220 pound packet of cargo. The quasi-fixed factor is the equivalent number of 10,000′ × 150′ runways at an airport. After correcting for first-order serial correlation, the analysis finds that airports operate under constant returns to runway utilization and multi-product decreasing returns to scale, production technology is consistent with product specific returns to capacity utilization and anti-complementarity across outputs, and general airport operations have input substitution possibilities with personnel and contractual repair/maintenance inputs. The study also finds 1.05% technology progress over the sample period, due to strong growth prior to 2001, with similar productivity growth rates for large and medium hubs.

X = multiple interpretations

This study provides a comparison of cost efficiency between foreign‐owned multinational banks operating in the U.S. and U.S.‐owned multinational banks in their production of banking services from 1984 to 1989. The results indicate that foreign‐owned multinational banks operating in the U.S. did not have comparative cost advantage over U.S.‐owned multinational banks.

The Leontief Paradox (Leontief, 1953) generated two major responses. There was, on the one hand, the body of research which was directed at further empirical verification of the simple Heckscher‐Ohlin theory using other countries' data. On the other hand, there were the studies which attempted to explain the paradox by turning on the alleged invalidity of specific Heckscher‐Ohlin assumptions. It was from the latter category that the “new” theories of trade emerged as evolutionary extensions of the basic Heckscher‐Ohlin theory. These hypotheses are concerned with the separate influences of inter‐country differences in specific labour skills, technology, and scale economies on the pattern of trade flows in manufactures.

During recent years, financial economists have made a significant contribution to the rapid development of a vibrant and growing literature on organization structure and corporate governance. In reviewing the development of this literature, it becomes easy to see how the seminal contributions of Ronald Coase (awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991) have become the cornerstone of a new institutional economics. In particular, researchers following in Coase’s footsteps have clarified the conditions under which voluntary contracts between private agents can resolve a wide variety of so-called “agency problems.” More than just representing an important discovery of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy, Coase’s work has become an important foundation for the theory of contracts and for the whole field of “organization economics.”