About the International Society for
Efficiency and Productivity Analysis

The mission of the Society is to extend, mutatis mutandis, the General Scope of the Journal of Productivity Analysis (http://www.springer.com/economics/microeconomics/journal/11123).  The Society promotes the study of theoretical and applied research addressing the measurement, analysis, and improvements in productivity and its components, particularly innovation and efficiency.  The Society supports and fosters research that uses theory and empirical techniques to measure productivity and provide business managers and public policy experts strategies to enhance productivity. The Society’s broad scope spans economics, management science, operations research, and business and public administration. A partial list of topics includes productivity theory, organizational design, index number theory, and related foundations of productivity analysis, computational methods employed in productivity analysis, and empirical studies based on data at all levels of aggregation.

The Society facilitate the following activities, among others, and the list will evolve as the Society evolves:

1. Working papers from the Society as well as other outlets from other universities and research centers engaging in productivity research
2. Information about upcoming conferences
3. Communication via our email list with the productivity and efficiency and productivity community
4. Access to job filings from potential academic and nonacademic employers
5. Short courses that speak to our research interests
6. Announcements (and calls for submissions) concerning special issues of the JPA and of Springer volumes on productivity and efficiency.
7. Calls for small grant submission to encourage workshops and collaborative efforts across research groups and across research centers that focus on productivity and efficiency
8. Information about consulting possibilities, and international and domestic calls for proposals on productivity and efficiency research.

The Society will be formally linked to our three international meetings in terms of planning and advertising and will also be responsible for coordinating other ad hoc conferences and new international ones as the need arises.  A conference that would be held in Central and South America is one such conference that may be organized to represent scholars and policy issues from that region of the world. 

An Affiliation agreement with Springer Nature has been negotiated that provides members of the Society with electronic subscriptions to the Journal of Productivity Analysis for US$10 annually.  Society Members may also receive an annual subscription for the print edition of the journal for US$50. Since a large number of potential members already have access to the JPA via JSTOR we hope this will encourage those in research settings, public policy, business, or whose libraries do not have the resources for JSTOR to also join the Society.  Also, the Society will make recommendations to Springer for editorial leadership of the Journal of Productivity Analysis. 

The Society has a coordinator for its website and staff to assist in its day-to-day operations.  Rice University’s Department of Economics is the current location of the Society as our application for IRS 501 c (3) status as a nonprofit requires a physical location for the Society.  Moreover, it also requires that the Society has officers (as spelled out in the By-Laws).   

The governance of the Society is modelled after a number of other professional Societies, such as the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE), (http://www.sole-jole.org/bylaws.htm), the International Society for Applied Econometrics (https://www.appliedeconometrics.org/), and the Society for Economic Measurement (https://sem.society.cmu.edu/home.html), among others.