Measuring the economic efficiency of airports: A Simar–Wilson methodology analysis

In this paper, the innovative two-stage procedure of Simar and Wilson [Simar, L., Wilson, P.W., 2007. Estimation and inference in two stage, semi-parametric models of productive efficiency. Journal of Econometrics 136, 31–64] is used to estimate the efficiency determinants of Italian airports. In the first stage, the airports’ relative technical efficiency is estimated with data envelopment analysis (DEA) to establish the airports that perform most efficiently. These airports could serve as peers to help improve performance of the least efficient airports. The paper ranks these airports according to their total productivity for the period 2001–2003. In the second stage, the Simar and Wilson (2007) procedure is used to bootstrap the DEA scores with a truncated regression. Economic implications arising from the study are also considered.