EFFICIENCY MEASURES AND OUTPUT SPECIFICATION: THE CASE OF EUROPEAN RAILWAYS

This study analyzes the sensitivity of the efficiency indicators of a sample of European railway companies to different alternatives in output specification. The results vary according to the specification selected. Investigating the causes of these differences reveals that the efficiency indicators obtained with different specifications can be brought substantially closer, particularly when the efficiency indicators obtained by considering freight and passenger train kilometers as output variables are corrected to account for the impact of the load factor.

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