Robust stochastic frontier analysis: a Student’s t-half normal model with application to highway maintenance costs in England

The presence of outliers in the data has implications for stochastic frontier analysis, and indeed any performance analysis methodology, because they may lead to imprecise parameter estimates and, crucially, lead to an exaggerated spread of efficiency predictions. In this paper we replace the normal distribution for the noise term in the standard stochastic frontier model with a Student’s t distribution, which generalises the normal distribution by adding a shape parameter governing the degree of kurtosis. This has the advantages of introducing flexibility in the heaviness of the tails, which can be determined by the data, as well as containing the normal distribution as a limiting case, and we outline how to test against the standard model. Monte Carlo simulation results for the maximum simulated likelihood estimator confirm that the model recovers appropriate frontier and distributional parameter estimates under various values of the true shape parameter. The simulation results also indicate the influence of a phenomenon we term ‘wrong kurtosis’ in the case of small samples, which is analogous to the issue of ‘wrong skewness’ previously identified in the literature. We apply a Student’s t-half normal cost frontier to data for highways authorities in England, and this formulation is found to be preferred by statistical testing to the comparator normal-half normal cost frontier model. The model yields a significantly narrower range of efficiency predictions, which are non-monotonic at the tails of the residual distribution.