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In this article, the innovative twostage procedure of Simar and Wilson (2007) is used to estimate the efficiency determinants of Portuguese hotel groups from 1998 to 2005. In the first stage, the hotels' technical efficiency is estimated with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), in order to establish which hotels have the most efficient performance. These could serve as peers to help improve performance of the least efficient hotels. In the second stage, the Simar and Wilson model is used to bootstrap the DEA scores with a truncated regression. The article contributes to the hotel industry literature by adopting a somewhat novel approach that has never been applied to this industry despite its managerial implications. The motivation for the analysis lies in the fact that during the period under analysis Portuguese hotels faced a number of threats. Knowing what the best practices are is then good news for managers and institutions.

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Purpose – This paper aims to shed some light on the role of boards of directors in improving internet financial reporting (IFR) quality. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical study uses a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach on a sample of 32 French firms belonging to the CAC40 index as of December 2007. Findings – The empirical results show that 28 percent of the sample firms are located on the efficiency frontier for all IFR components. These firms' boards of directors and their committees seem to act as effective monitors of top executives, which improves the quality of the firm's disclosure policy through, inter alia, an increase in the level of IFR. Under efficient board control, firms develop user-friendly and readily accessible web sites disclosing the information required by various stakeholders. Additional empirical results show that 46.9 percent of the sample firms lie outside the efficiency frontier for all IFR measures, suggesting inefficiencies in the composition, structure, and/or functioning of their boards of directors. The inefficient monitoring and oversight of top executives by the board allowed for lower levels of IFR quality for nearly half of the CAC40 firms in 2007. Research limitations/implications – The study uses only CAC40 companies, which are relatively large and financially healthier than the average French firms, exhibiting diffuse ownership structures, with heavy foreign shareholding, and investing more in communications. This may limit the generalizability of the results to other French listed firms. Originality/value – The paper extends the literature on corporate governance and voluntary corporate disclosure by investigating the association between board characteristics and IFR quality. It examines the relative performance of the board directors in improving IFR policy.

We analyze hospital efficiency and productivity growth using an innovative approach which employs the directional distance function and the Luenberger productivity indicator. The primary advantage of our approach is that both input contractions and output expansions are considered. Our model generates a productivity indicator that is decomposed into the usual constituents of productivity growth: technological change and efficiency change. For the sake of comparison, we also use the Malmquist productivity index. The empirical results based on a sample of Portuguese hospitals from 1997 to 2004 show that, on average, those hospitals experienced very weak productivity growth over that period. In addition, the incidence of technological change was remarkably low.

This paper analyses the relative effi ciency and productivity of a representative sample of Portuguese hotels by using the directional distance function and the Luenberger productivity indicator. The key advantage of this approach is that both input contraction and output expansion are considered. The model generates hotel effi ciency scores, ranking the hotels in the sample. We conclude that both inputs and outputs play a major role in hotel effi ciency. Therefore, we suggest an alteration of management procedures in order to enable effi ciency to be increased, based on an effective enhanced-incentive policy and taking into account the small hotel characteristics of the sample.

This paper presents a new methodology for analysing efficiency and productivity in the tourism industry in an aggregate context. More precisely, by using the directional distance function, an aggregate Luenberger productivity indicator for a group of tourist firms is proposed. Moreover, the possibility of the reallocation of inputs and outputs between the individual tourist firms in the group is considered. Finally, this new performance measure is illustrated by considering a group of hotels.