211 – Contributed Poster Presentations: Business and Economic Statistics Section
Stochastic Frontier Estimation of the Technical Efficiency of Seaports in the United States
Neela D. Manage
Florida Atlantic University
The objective of this paper is to identify factors that determine efficiency of container terminals at major U.S. seaports using stochastic frontier estimation. Growth in global maritime trade and the recent Panama Canal expansion project have resulted in important infrastructure upgrades at U.S. seaports that handle containerized cargo. This study plans to assess how these changes in their capital structure and the resulting increase in capacity had an impact on the productivity and efficiency of U.S. seaports. Seaports have an important impact on local businesses and job creation and are thus critically linked to the economic development of metropolitan areas where they are located. The empirical analysis utilizes panel data for the top twenty-five container seaports in the United States during the period 2015 to 2018. The data provide detailed measures of port throughput (i.e., the amount of cargo a port handles in a given year) and a variety of factors that influence port capacity. This study estimates fixed-effects and random-effects panel stochastic frontier production models to obtain estimates of port efficiency.