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	Malmquist Firm Productivity Index	Tobin's Q Firm Value Analysis
Field	Strategic Management	Strategic Management
Family	MCDM	Regression model
Year of origin	1994	1981
Originator	Rolf Fare, Shawna Grosskopf, Mary Norris & Zhongyang Zhang; Douglas Caves, Laurits Christensen & Erwin Diewert	Eric B. Lindenberg & Stephen A. Ross; Kee H. Chung & Stephen W. Pruitt
Type	Distance-function index of total factor productivity change for firms	Market-valuation ratio used as a firm performance and rent measure
Seminal source	Fare, R., Grosskopf, S., Norris, M., & Zhang, Z. (1994). Productivity growth, technical progress, and efficiency change in industrialized countries. American Economic Review, 84(1), 66-83.	Lindenberg, E. B., & Ross, S. A. (1981). Tobin's q Ratio and Industrial Organization. Journal of Business, 54(1), 1-32.
Aliases	Malmquist TFP Index for Firms, Firm Productivity Change Decomposition, Distance-Function Productivity Index, Malmquist Total Factor Productivity Index	Tobin's Q Ratio Analysis, Market-to-Replacement-Cost Analysis, Q-Ratio Firm Performance Measure, Approximate Tobin's Q
Related	3	3
Summary	The Malmquist firm productivity index measures how a firm's total factor productivity changes between two periods and decomposes that change into two strategically meaningful parts: catching up to best practice (efficiency change) and the best-practice frontier itself shifting (technical change). The index is grounded in Caves, Christensen and Diewert's 1982 theory of productivity index numbers built from distance functions, and was made operational for empirical work by Fare, Grosskopf, Norris and Zhang in 1994, who showed how to compute it from data using linear-programming distance functions and to split it into efficiency-change and frontier-shift components. For firms, it answers whether productivity gains came from better management closing the gap to the leaders or from the whole industry's technological possibilities expanding.	Tobin's q is the ratio of a firm's market value to the replacement cost of its assets, and it serves in strategy and industrial organization as a forward-looking measure of value creation and economic rent. A q above one means the market values the firm at more than it would cost to rebuild its assets, signaling that the firm earns rents -- from market power, brands, technology, or hard-to-replicate capabilities -- beyond the competitive return on capital. Lindenberg and Ross's 1981 study brought q into empirical industrial organization, developing an algorithm to estimate the replacement cost of assets and showing how q relates to monopoly power and barriers to entry. Because exact replacement costs are laborious, Chung and Pruitt's 1994 paper introduced a simple approximation built entirely from standard accounting and market data that tracks the exact measure closely, making q practical for large-sample research on firm performance.