Oxera Associate, Professor Emmanuel Thanassoulis, along with faculty members of Aston Business School, are organising DEA40: International Conference on Data Envelopment Analysis, to be held between 16 and 18 April at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. The conference will focus on recent theoretical developments and applications in Data Envelopment Analysis, as well as wider aspects of efficiency benchmarking (e.g. alternative techniques such as Stochastic Frontier Analysis; real-world applications). There will be participation from academics and practitioners from across the world.
 
Oxera is one of the sponsors of this prestigious conference, and our in-house efficiency experts, Alan Horncastle and Dr Srini Parthasarathy, alongside Oxera Associates, Professors Emmanuel Thanassoulis and Subal Kumbhakar, are closely involved in the design and organisation of some of the technical and application sessions.
 
The conference is expected to have a stream of sessions on regulatory applications, focusing on:
 
·         regulatory tools for capital expenditure review and approval;
·         total expenditure versus separate OPEX/CAPEX benchmarking: issues and solutions;
·         treatment of heterogeneity and outliers in benchmarking;
·         determination of appropriate ‘margin of error’: overview of European approaches;
·         best practice in model development procedure (‘cost-driver analysis’);
·         robust approaches to determining general productivity target (‘Xgen’; ‘dynamic efficiency’).
 
These sessions—the content of which is still being consulted on with delegates—will be facilitated by Oxera and other experts. They will not require any presentation on the delegates’ part, but rather the aim is to have informed brainstorming sessions to facilitate takeaways for the participants.
 
The conference will feature a plenary speech on regulation, and a panel discussion that Oxera Principal, Dr Srini Parthasarathy, will take part in. The panel discussion will cover expert views on aspects of regulatory benchmarking applications from academic, corporate and consulting perspectives.