adoption of new tobacco varieties in greece impacts of empirical findings on policy design abstract greece is a major international tobacco producer flue cured tobacco varieties constituted the major alternative crop to greek farmers growing certain oriental tobacco varieties diffusion of flue cured tobacco was rapid due to its high yields and the depressed market for certain oriental tobacco varieties currently the common organisation of the tobacco market is undergoing substantial changes and the farmers response will be a vital factor of success a portfolio selection model reveals that the major factors influencing the adoption decision of tobacco growers are the size of the farm measured in annual work units the farm s proximity to urban centres the farm s diversification and the farmer s age the number of contacts with institutions is surprisingly inversely related to adoption future tobacco policies impinging on factors influencing decisions to adopt new varieties or production practices may be more cost effective

a generalized measure of farm specific technical efficiency single measures of farm specific technical efficiency over time are calculated for rice farms in central luzon the philippines from the residuals of a stochastic frontier production function panel data from the international rice research institute s periodic loop survey are used results show a narrow range of efficiency between 84 and 95 across the twenty two farms so that there is limited scope for increasing output by resource reallocation a comparison is made with measures of technical efficiency using traditional covariance analysis

fertilization under uncertainty an analysis based on producer yield expectations optimal nitrogen fertilizer levels are computed for a sample of texas coastal bend grain sorghum producers based on their assessed subjective conditional yield and price probabilities utility measures and cost information producers mean yield expectations were substantially greater than experimental yield response and their perceptions of the effects of nitrogen on yield variability were contrary to usual characterization of nitrogen as a risk increasing input optimal fertilizer levels based on expected utility maximization represent actual fertilizer use somewhat better than those based on expected profit maximization however both calculated levels were high relative to actual fertilizer use

a nonparametric cost approach to scale efficiency starting with farrell fieldhouse 1962 a host of notiparametric models have been developed for calculation of scale efficiency a common property of these models is that they are specified in terms of input output data duality theory has taught us that technological characteristics may be analyzed from either the primal or the dual cost side the purpose of this paper is to introduce a nonparametric dual method of calculating scale efficiency

whether crop diversification is energy efficient an empirical analysis from bangladesh abstract this study examines whether crop diversification provides economy in energy use and improves technical energy efficiency using a large survey data of 2075 farms from 20 sub districts of 17 districts in bangladesh by applying a stochastic input distance function approach the results reveal that cereal production significantly increases energy use by 0 14 for every one percent increase in output renewable source of energy constitutes 59 6 of total inputs and labour energy alone constitutes 39 significant output complementarity exists between cereal and oilseed enterprises but competition exist between jute with pulse and or oilseed enterprises the mean technical energy efficiency is estimated at 68 implying that energy output can be increased by 32 by eliminating inefficiency diversification amongst enterprises is associated with energy inefficiency implying that specialization into cereals improves efficiency large farms are inefficient whereas large family size improves efficiency the key policy implication is that diversification of crop enterprises must maintain cereal i e rice wheat maize as the main base and then add non cereal crops e g oilseeds in order to improve energy economy also diversification within cereals from rice monoculture to wheat and or maize will significantly improve technical energy efficiency

evaluating the impact of agricultural extension on farms performance in crete a nonneutral stochastic frontier approach this article attempts to integrate the production and the efficiency based approaches for evaluating the impact of extension on farms performance for this purpose the nonneutral production frontier model is used and the empirical analysis refers to a sample of farms from crete greece the empirical results support the proposed formulation instead of either the production or the efficiency based formulations as extension was found to have a statistically significant effect on closing both the technology and management gaps public and private extension services were found to be competitive in the production function and complementary in the technical inefficiency effect function in addition farms using both public and private extension services achieved a higher degree of technical efficiency than those using either public or private extension services and farms with no extension services were found to be the least efficient

the economic theory of agrarian institutions introduction alternative approaches to the theory of institutions in economic development pranab bardhan rational peasants efficient institutions and a theory of rural organization methodological remarks for development economics joseph e stiglitz part 1 land and labour theories of sharecropping nirvikar singh a comparison of principal agent and bargaining solutions the case of tenancy contracts clive bell contracts with eviction in infinitely repeated principal agent relationships bhaskar dutta et al production relations in semi arid african agriculture hans binswanger et al part 2 credit and interlinked transactions rural credit markets the structure of interest rates exploitation and efficiency kaushik basu credit and agrarian class structure mukesh eswaran and ashok kotwal credit rationing tenancy productivity and the dynamics of inequality avishay braverman and joseph e stiglitz on choice among creditors and bonded labour contracts t n srinivasan some aspects of linked product and credit market contracts among risk neutral agents clive bell and t n srinivasan a note on interlinked rural economic arrangements pranab bardhan interlinkages and the pattern of competition debraj ray and kunal sengupta part 3 marketing and insurance agricultural institutions for insurance and stabilization david m newbery peasants risk aversion and the choice of marketing intermediaries and contracts a bargaining theory of equilibrium marketing contracts pinhas zusman part 4 co operatives technology and the state agricultural producer co operatives louis putterman institutional analysis of credit co operatives avishay braverman and j luis guasch agrarian structure technological innovations and the state alain de janvry et al

estimation and decomposition of technical efficiency for sugarbeet farms this study computes technical efficiency for idaho sugarbeet farms and decomposes it into pure technical efficiency scale efficiency and congestion efficiency using nonparametric procedures the results indicate that the average efficiency is 0 88 with 45 of the farms in the sample exhibiting full efficiency improper scale operation and input overutilization are the major sources of inefficiency for remaining farms technical efficiency is independent of farm size a tobit model was used to examine the impacts of variables such as farm size specialization tenancy position hired labour location and managerial ability on efficiency inefficiency in sugarbeet production results in a shortfall of potential revenues not only for producers but also for landlords and processors

the structure of technical efficiency it is common practice to decompose measures of efficiency into component measures of technical and allocative efficiency in this paper we show how and why to decompose a general measure of technical efficiency into component measures of purely technical efficiency congestion and scale efficiency and we investigate the properties of each measure we do so for a multiple output technology which satisfies a weak axiom system that does not include either constant returns to scale or strong input disposability

nonparametric analysis of technical pure technical and scale efficiencies for food crop production in east java indonesia abstract nonparametric analysis of technical efficiency for irrigated farms in the madiun regency in the west central part of east java indonesia is conducted using linear programming techniques this procedure allows the relative technical efficiency for each farm to be determined and for inefficiencies to be decomposed into pure technical inefficiency and scale inefficiency and does not require restrictions or assumptions regarding functional form to be placed on the data farmers in madiun generally are efficient relative to each other farmers operating inefficiently do so more often because of scale inefficiencies rather than pure technical inefficiencies a majority of the farms operate in the region of decreasing returns to scale rather than increasing returns to scale farmer age the level of diversification of cropping activities and high school education were found to be related to technical efficiency in the rainy season under irrigated conditions other socioeconomic factors were not statistically significant the results imply that inefficient farms use excessive levels of inputs particularly nitrogen fertilizer this is perhaps due to the lingering effects of past input subsidization policies particularly of fertilizers in indonesia or to risk reducing behavior the results also imply that current government policies to encourage diversification of cropping practices in java may lead to greater technical inefficiencies in production in addition extension education targeted to younger farmers with low levels of formal education would improve efficiency

analysis of environmental efficiency variation in this article we develop and implement a methodology for analyzing the sources of variation in environmental efficiency across producers we formulate a two stage model in the first stage we use stochastic frontier analysis to estimate both technical and environmental efficiency in the second stage we again use stochastic frontier analysis to regress estimated environmental efficiency scores against a variety of technology physical environment and management variables in this stage we estimate the impact of each explanatory variable on environmental efficiency and we derive conditional estimates of environmental efficiency from the one sided error component we illustrate our methodology with an empirical application to a panel of dutch dairy farms we find evidence of relatively low levels of environmental efficiency and we find that environmental efficiency can be improved through a number of policy options including the provision of farmers with more insight into the nutrient balance of their farms

portfolio manager behavior and global financial crises abstract i develop a two market agent based model to study how global portfolio managers affect global financial crises and stability first i create an agent based model where fund managers make their allocation decisions between two markets and a risk free asset based on the mean variance framework simulation results reveal that global managers do not create global financial crises second i extend the base model by incorporating insights from behavioral finance where risk is instead determined by fund manager losses simulation results reveal that slight global manager losses can trigger a widening of both markets risk premium accelerating the decline in asset prices worldwide statistical analysis reveals that global managers are a stabilizing force in smaller numbers however they become destabilizing in larger numbers the ability to reduce risk by diversifying across markets results in excessive risk taking if global managers exist in larger numbers systematic over leverage may result such that a deleveraging process can lead to the spreading of financial crises

global and local scale characteristics in convex and nonconvex nonparametric technologies a first empirical exploration the purpose of this contribution is to empirically implement and supplement the proposals made by podinovski 2004b to explore the nature of both global and local returns to scale in nonconvex nonparametric technologies in particular we both propose a simplified method to compute the global returns to scale and employ some secondary data sets to investigate the frequency of the special case of global sub constant returns to scale furthermore when determining global returns to scale using both convex and nonconvex technologies we verify how often the resulting information is concordant or conflicting finally besides comparing the fdh and dea evolution of ray average productivity for some typical individual observations we introduce in the literature two original methods for the determination of local returns to scale in nonconvex technologies

whether crop diversification is a desired strategy for agricultural growth in bangladesh abstract this study aimed at examining the merit of crop diversification as a strategy for agricultural growth in bangladesh specifically the existence of economies of diversification scale economies and diversification efficiencies at the farm level were examined using a stochastic input distance function approach the results reveal strong evidence of diversification economies amongst most crop enterprises except the combination of modern rice and modern wheat enterprises ray economies of scale exist in bangladeshi cropping system also significant are efficiency gains made from diversification among cropping enterprises the key policy implication is that crop diversification should be a desired strategy for agricultural growth in bangladesh development of the rural infrastructure is also essential as this will not only improve technical efficiency but may also synergistically promote crop diversification by opening up opportunities for technology diffusion marketing storage and resource supplies

introduction to the stability of rational expectations equilibrium abstract this paper surveys the literature which examines the stability of the expectations that agents are assumed to have in a rational expectations equilibrium ree this issue is more complex than the usual statistical estimation problem because the relationship between observable variables and payoff relevant variables is endogenous one approach taken in the literature yields convergence to a ree but requires agents to have extensive knowledge about the structure and dynamics of the model that prevails while they learn a second approach does not assume that agents have correctly specified likelihood functions and finds that ree may not be stable

the spanish beef sector in the 1990s impact of the bse crisis on efficiency and profitability the beef sector has undergone a series of changes as a result of successive food scares and agricultural policy reforms the purpose of the paper is to analyse technical efficiency and profitability in spanish livestock enterprises during the 1990s focusing on the possible impact of the bse crisis and the 1992 cap reform on each of these variables the main findings reveal the existence of technical inefficiency during the sample period some factors have a positive impact others a negative impact on efficiency as far as the effects of cap reform and the bse crisis are concerned the results show the ineffectiveness of agricultural policy regulation to promote efficiency in the sector and the improvement in the efficiency as a consequence of the bse crisis the profitability analysis reveals the importance of direct subsidies however in their absence a large percentage of holdings is unable to remunerate either own or rented factors analysis shows therefore that there are two counteracting effec

farm household efficiency in bangladesh a comparison of stochastic frontier and dea methods this study compares estimates of technical efficiency obtained from the stochastic frontier approach and the data envelopment analysis dea approach using farm level survey data for rice farmers in bangladesh technical inefficiency effects are modelled as a function of farm specific socioeconomic factors environmental factors and irrigation infrastructure the results from both the approaches indicate that efficiency is significantly influenced by the factors measuring environmental degradation and irrigation infrastructure

ranking farms with a composite indicator of sustainability the assessment of sustainability at farm level has been growing in popularity over the last few years this article contributes to this line of research by building up composite indicators for different facets social economic environmental and global of farm sustainability using a methodological approach that combines data envelopment analysis dea and multicriteria decision making mcdm methods and assigns common weights to each individual sustainability indicator this approach is applied to a database of 163 farms located in the campos county a region belonging to the dry lands of the spanish northern plateau using 12 individual indicators of sustainability our findings show that both economic and environmental composite sustainability indicators are positively correlated but that this is not the case for the social indicator we also check the influence of a set of variables on farm sustainability using bootstrapping statistical techniques and showing that increasing farm size membership in agricultural cooperatives and farmers medium and upper agricultural specific technical education all exert a significant positive influence on sustainability these results provide clues for policy makers that intend to design sustainability increasing structural agricultural policies

oscillations in the rodriguez model of entry and price dynamics abstract this paper is concerned with improving the existence of limit cycles in rodriguez s industry evolution model approximate expression period and stability conditions of the permanent oscillations near the equilibrium are explicitly found by applying the bifurcation method of iooss and joseph

efficiency productivity and determinants of inefficiency at public day care centers in sweden efficiency differences among day care centers and productivity change over time are examined on the basis of nonparametric frontiers calculated using the dea methodology the data consist of approximately 200 public day care centers in gothenburg sweden for the years 1988 and 1989 the findings indicate a potential output increase of about 10 to 15 per cent each year and a productivity decrease of 3 per cent between the years an attempt is also made to explain the differences in inefficiency by applying a tobit model

dynamic efficiency measurement theory and application nonparametric dynamic measures of production efficiency are developed in the context of an adjustment cost technology and intertemporal cost minimization bounds on each efficiency measure are derived for each firm using a nonparametric revealed preference approach long run efficiency measures indicate the relative efficiency of both variable and dynamic factors while short run measures of efficiency indicate whether variable inputs are employed efficiently in the production process the efficiency measures are temporal in nature by describing the degree of efficiency of the firm at a particular point along its adjustment path the empirical implementation is illustrated for a balanced panel of pennsylvania dairy operators during 1986 1992

too small to be beautiful the farm size and productivity relationship in bangladesh this paper examines the agricultural productivity farm size relationship in the context of bangladesh features of bangladesh s agriculture help overcome several limitations in testing the inverse farm size productivity relationship in other developing country settings a stochastic production frontier model is applied using data from three rounds of a household panel survey to estimate simultaneously the production frontier and the technical inefficiency functions the correlated random effects approach is used to control for unobserved heterogeneous household effects methodologically the results suggest that the stochastic production frontier models that ignore the inefficiency function are likely mis specified and may result in misleading conclusions on the farm size productivity relationship empirically the findings confirm that the farm size and productivity relationship is negative but with the inverse relationship diminishing over time total factor productivity growth driven by technical change is found to have been robust across the sample across farm size groups the relatively larger farmers experienced faster technical change which helped them to catch up and narrow the productivity gap with the smaller farmers

economic efficiency in farm households trends explanatory factors and estimation methods factors explaining differences in economic efficiency between farms are of major interest to owners managers and other stakeholders as they strive to improve earnings and improve the chances of firm survival this study is undertaken to improve our understanding of interfarm differences in and opportunities to improve farm household efficiency in utilizing their land labor and capital resources to achieve household objectives the technical allocative and scale efficiencies of farm households are estimated using a nonparametric output based data envelopment analysis dea of a panel data set from 1993 to 2006 single and double bootstrapping procedures are used to estimate technical efficiency initial technical efficiency assuming variable returns to scale tev is estimated to be 0 83 using single bootstrapping the average bias corrected tev estimate is 0 70 using double bootstrapping the tev estimate is 0 72 allocative efficiency is estimated to be 0 81 scale efficiency is estimated to be 0 93 the only factor that is consistently associated with higher technical efficiency across analysis methods and years is larger farm size as measured by the log of farm income the significance of other factors changes with analysis methods

farm productivity and efficiency in rural bangladesh the role of education revisited this article reassesses the debate over the role of education in farm production in bangladesh using a large dataset on rice producing households from 141 villages average and stochastic production frontier functions are estimated to ascertain the effect of education on productivity and efficiency a full set of proxies for farm education stock variables are incorporated to investigate the internal as well as external returns to education the external effect is investigated in the context of rural neighbourhoods our analysis reveals that in addition to raising rice productivity and boosting potential output household education significantly reduces production inefficiencies however we are unable to find any evidence of the externality benefit of schooling neighbour s education does not matter in farm production we discuss the implication of these findings for rural education programmes in bangladesh

walrasian and marshallian stability abstract it is well known that there is no direct relation between stability of the walrasian t tonnement process and stability of the marshallian quantity adjustment process it is shown that if short run walrasian t tonnement with a given number of firms is distinguished there is under the assumption of no joint production local stability of the short run walrasian adjustment process if and only if there is local stability of the long run marshallian adjustment process with exit and entry of firms according to profit levels

dea duality on returns to scale rts in production and cost analyses an occurrence of multiple solutions and differences between production based and cost based rts estimates this article discusses the concept of rts returns to scale in the framework of dea data envelopment analysis production and cost analyses focusing on an occurrence of multiple solutions and how to deal with such a difficulty dual relationships between production based and cost based rts estimates are also theoretically discussed in this study

general equilibrium with free entry a synthetic approach to the theory of perfect competition the purpose of this essay is to explain a new theory of perfect competition that synthesizes the arrow debreu mckenzie and marshallian theories and summarizes the recent work of a large number of researchers the synthetic theory provides a logically precise general equilibrium framework that can be used both for positive analysis as well as to form a basis for the classical theorems of welfare economics in these aspects it follows the adm theory however as in the marshallian theory there is free entry in the form of an unbounded pool of firms which have access to the existing technology also as in the marshallian theory the average cost curves available to each firm are u shaped in contrast to both the marshallian and the adm theories we do not take price taking as a hypothesis we use the term perfect competition to describe a situation in which firms are arbitrarily small relative to the markets in which they are involved the firms in our model correctly perceive the effect of the amount that they place on the market on prices and they act to maximize profit with this in mind perfectly competitive equilibria are defined as the limit points of equilibria as firms become small relative to the market and following cournot we observe that as firms become small their ability to influence price disappears a new condition is identified which is important for the viability of competitive markets loosely speaking this condition requires that prices provide the proper entry signals for firms if one thinks of each firm as associated with the use of an unpriced and nondivisible resource sometimes referred to as entrepreneurship then in equilibrium the returns to that factor must fall with entry and rise with exit not only the stability theorems of the synthetic theory but also the existence theorem reject the application of the competitive model to a regime in which entry drives up and exit reduces the profit of similar firms

technical and scale efficiency of japanese commerical banks a non parametric approach not only are the nature and extent and scale efficiency of japanese commerical banks studied but a relationship between both organizational status and size efficiency is also announced the efficiency measures are computed from a 1990 sample of cross sectional data for the estimation we employ the non parametric approach which has recently been gaining popularity for the studies of banking efficiency outside japan

the economic efficiency of farmers growing high yielding irrigated rice in india the high yielding varieties program has been operating for some fifteen years in india as a result the modern technology is no longer a new technology particularly for irrigated rice farmers the issue addressed in this paper therefore is whether farmers producing high yielding varieties hyv of rice are doing so in an economically efficient manner or do substantial opportunities remain to increase the efficiency of the farmers application of modern rice technology to get an empirical answer and to assess better the economic performance of farmers a study area was chosen to approach ideal field conditions for implementation of the program economic performance can be measured by comparing the economic efficiencies of farmer groups small and large the profit function developed by yotopoulos and lau is used as an analytical tool to examine economic efficiency including technical and price efficiency for the empirical estimation of profit and variable factor demand functions a random sample of seventy farmers growing a hyv ir20 in rabi winter season 1977 78 was selected from a progressive village in the coimbatore district tamil nadu a favorably placed area in terms of irrigation administration paddy varieties and other such factors the total population of the village seyyampalayam consisted of about 55 of farmers having operational holdings of 1 hectare or less with an average of 0 64 hectare the other 45 had operational holdings of above 1 hectare with an average of 2 79 hectares accordingly equal representation was given to both groups 35 farmers each in our random sample defining a larger farmer as one with more than 1 hectare

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

an application of the dea double bootstrap to examine sources of efficiency in bangladesh rice farming in this article we examine sources of technical efficiency for rice farming in bangladesh the motivation for the analysis is the need to close the rice yield gap to enable food security we employ the dea double bootstrap of simar and wilson 2007 to estimate and explain technical efficiency this technique overcomes severe limitations inherent in using the two stage dea approach commonly employed in the efficiency literature from a policy perspective our results show that potential efficiency gains to reduce the yield gap are greater than previously found statistically positive influences on technical efficiency are education extension and credit with age being a negative influence

static efficiency decompositions and capacity utilisation integrating economic and technical capacity notions starting from existing static decompositions of overall economic efficiency on nonparametric production and cost frontiers this article proposes more comprehensive decompositions including several cost based notions of capacity utilization furthermore in case prices are lacking we develop additional decompositions of overall technical efficiency integrating a technical concept of capacity utilization these new efficiency decompositions provide a link between short and long run economic analysis and in empirical work avoid conflating inefficiency and differences in capacity utilization an empirical analysis using a monthly panel of chilean hydro electric power plants illustrates the potential of these decomposition proposals

technical efficiency in developing country agriculture a meta analysis abstract a meta analysis is performed to review empirical estimates of technical efficiency te in developing country agriculture the objective of the study is to contribute to a better understanding of the factors that influence estimates of mean te a data set of 51 observations of te from 32 studies is used in order to test if specific characteristics of the data and econometric specifications account for systematic differences in the efficiency estimates results using the two limit tobit procedure indicate that factors such as primal versus dual number of fixed inputs and number of variable inputs increase average te estimates on the other hand using the cobb douglas functional form and cross sectional data yields a lower level of te other factors including the number of variables in the model crop type stochastic versus deterministic frontiers and sample size do not seem to significantly affect estimates of te across studies

conspicuous consumption dynamics abstract we formalize veblen s idea of conspicuous consumption as two alternative forms of interdependent preferences dubbed envy and pride agents adjust consumption patterns gradually in the direction of increasing utility from an arbitrary initial state the distribution of consumption among agents with identical preferences converges to a unique equilibrium distribution when pride is stronger the equilibrium distribution has a right skewed density when envy is stronger the equilibrium is concentrated at a single point and the adjustment dynamics involve a shock wave that can be interpreted as a growing moving homogeneous middle class

education and technical efficiency during the green revolution in pakistan tion is more likely to arise during disequilibrium caused by technical change in agriculture this may be because technical change renders the existing cultural practices obsolete or inadequate and calls for an adjustment a more educated farmer is supposed to make the required adjustment more quickly this article tests the foregoing hypothesis in pakistan agriculture during the green revolution when introduction of new crop varieties disturbed the prevailing equilibrium for this purpose a production function approach is used and the analysis is conducted not only for the new crop varieties but also for their traditional counterparts the results lend support to the hypothesis by showing that the worker effect is stronger for new crop varieties than it is for traditional ones the article is divided into five sections in the next section a brief review of the literature is presented section iii presents the hypothesis and discusses the methodology used for the analysis the results and their policy implications are discussed in section iv and section v concludes the article ii brief literature review in a pioneering study exploring the economic effects of education z griliches used production function analysis to highlight the contri

on endogenous competitive business cycles the belief that the long run equilibrium of a competitive monetary economy that does not experience any exogeneous shocks whether originating from the external environment or from policy should be modelled as a state that is stationary or perhaps growing at a constant rate seems to be deeply rooted in the mind of some economists

land use intensification potential in slash and burn farming through improvements in technical efficiency abstract much attention is being paid to find alternative land use options in slash and burn sab farming or forest fallow based shifting cultivation systems the conservation objective is often twofold that is to discourage farmers from expanding into the forest frontier and to reduce the ecological damage from burning plots options include the total abandonment of forest plots the adoption of productivity increasing green revolution type technologies and the application of modern evergreen agroforestry knowledge this paper evaluates another alternative the intensification of land use by improving technical efficiency in farming this involves the reduction of land clearing while at the same time maintaining crop output levels and the local and traditional low input technology the potential for such land use intensification is empirically assessed with ecological and socioeconomic household data from yucatan mexico the methodology is based on both parametric and nonparametric output and input distance functions in addition the sources of inefficiency are addressed the results of the analysis suggest that on and off farm labour diversification can play a key role to help shifting cultivating households to improve their technical efficiency in farming and thus to help to intensify land use furthermore while the empirical results point towards the positive effect of soil fertility mainly determined by the length of forest fallows on crop output levels farmers appear to overcome the ecological constraint of farming in less fertile soils by being more technically efficient

farmer behavior under risk of failure cudari c department of agricultural and resource economi division of agriculture and natural resources l university of california ut workingpaperno 488 j re v farmer behavior under risk of failure by william e foster and gordon c hausser giannini foundation of agricultural economics uerary cr california agricultural experiment station giannini foundation of agricultural economics october 1990

nonparametric analysis of technical and allocative efficiencies in production in this paper we extend varian s 1984 nonparametric production analysis to situations when the set of observed output input and price data is not consistent with profit maximization for at least one firm in such cases varian s results imply that no production possibility set containing all observations can rationalize the observed data we identify each firm whose performance given the prices faced by it may be found consistent with profit maximization relative to some production possibility set containing all observed output input vectors we show that the set 4 of all such firms can itself be weaklv rationalized in the sense that there exists a closed convex and monotone production possibility set that contains all the observations and relative to which the performance of all the firms in the set 8o is consistent with profit maximization given their respective prices by definition firms not included in this largest set d of efficient observations unambiguously deviate from profit maximizing behavior for any production possibility set containing all observations we follow farrell 1957 and analyze these deviations into technical and allocative efficiency measures considering as admissible all closed convex and monotone production possibility sets relative to which the performance of each firm in the set g remains consistent with profit maximization we then describe nonparametric methods for determining the tightest upper and lower bounds on the technical allocative and aggregate efficiency measures evaluated relative to all such admissible production possibility sets it is seen that the tightest upper bound on the technical efficiency measure is the same as the value computed by the nonparametric efficiency evaluation technique known as data envelopment analysis thus establishing a link between this literature in management science operations research and the nonparametric production analysis in economics

the nature of the farm abstract using a model based on a trade off between moral hazard incentives and gains from specialization this paper explains why farming has generally not converted from small family based firms into large factory style corporate firms nature is both seasonal and random and the interplay of these qualities generates moral hazard limits the gains from specialization and causes timing problems between stages of production by identifying conditions in which these forces vary we derive testable predictions about the choice of organization and the extent of farm integration to test these predictions we study the historical development of several agricultural industries and analyze data from a sample of over 1 000 farms in british columbia and louisiana in general seasonality and randomness so limit the benefits of specialization that family farms are optimal but when farmers are successful in mitigating the effects of seasonality and random shocks to output farm organizations gravitate toward fa

estimating product specific and multiproduct economies of scale with data envelopment analysis nonparametric cost frontier estimation and subsequent analysis of the relative efficiency of firms has historically been conducted without critically examining the shape of the cost frontier the shape of the cost frontier has been examined using additional parametric estimation methods to recover potential cost savings from multiproduct and product specific economies of scale this paper presents and tests an approach to estimate multiproduct and product specific economies of scale using data envelopment analysis data for the study are simulated assuming an underlying production technology nonparametric estimates of efficiency multiproduct scale product specific scale and scope economies are compared to those of the assumed production technology results show that the nonparametric approach accurately estimates multiproduct economies of scale and product specific economies of scale under alternative inefficiency distributional assumptions

cost efficiency of electric grid utilities in china a comparison of estimates from sfa mle sfa bayes and stoned cnls with the purpose of estimating the range of cost efficiency levels of the power grid sector in china we assembled a data set including 23 provincial power grid companies spanning from 2005 to 2009 and conducted an empirical study based on the sfa mle sfa bayes and stoned cnls methodologies empirical results show that the average values of efficiency from different models vary from 0 85 to 0 92 depending especially on the assumptions underlying inefficiency content further results demonstrate that there is exogenous technical progress during the sample period and per capita gdp of the province is negatively related to the costs of the electric grid company located in the corresponding province we hope this empirical study will contribute to the debate on an efficiency based regulation scheme which was introduced to the chinese electric grid sector on a pilot base in 2014

a within farm efficiency comparison of silvopasture systems with conventional pasture and forestry in northeast argentina agroforestry which has multiple inputs and outputs would benefit from scrutiny of economic efficiency because levels of adoption have not met expectations previous literature estimated the efficiency of agricultural systems using data envelopment analysis however the vast variability between farms makes comparing systems difficult this study uses paired within farm comparisons of silvopasture a combination of planted trees and pasture to conventional cattle ranching and plantation forestry to evaluate the relative technical efficiency silvopasture proves to be more efficient than conventional cattle ranching forestry demonstrated increasing returns to scale cattle raising demonstrated decreasing returns to scale for large scale farmers and silvopasture was intermediate jel d24 o13

effects of scale economies and production seasonality on optimal hub locations the case of regional fresh produce aggregation interest in supporting local and regional food systems is rising and food hubs have attracted considerable attention among federal state and local policymakers this study explores the problem of endogenous hub location in fresh produce value chains in the northeastern united states to overcome limitations in the literature we incorporate the effects of economies of scale and production seasonality into our models three experimental models are designed to examine the effects of alternatively applying yearly quarterly and monthly data on model solutions we explicitly assess how interactions of scale economies and seasonality influence the structure and spatial attributes of an optimal regional produce aggregation hub system the three models generate marketed different solutions and in many respects they lead to different conclusions about developing local regional supply chains the monthly model allows for production seasonality and actual hub operation cycle frequency and thus leads to more efficient hub solution with rich policy implications

stability in a simple pure consumption loan model abstract we consider a simple overlapping generation model with outside money and one consumption good a class of price expectation functions is characterized such that the stationary market equilibrium is globally stable

on learning and rational expectations in an overlapping generations model abstract this paper investigates whether learning does actually lead to rational expectations in an overlapping generations model with fiat money expectations are formed according to a family of expectations functions containing a rational expectations scheme and indexed by a single parameter this parameter is updated in every period to fit the latest observations one finds that unless the agents have rational expectations to start with expectations will generally not converge towards rational expectations in this simple model

technical efficiency and farm size a conditional analysis the relationship between technical efficiency and size might be affected by farm heterogeneity we analyse this relationship conditional on a set of control variables these control variables are chosen using a production model where technical efficiency is introduced as a parameter as a result technical efficiency affects both the input demand and the output supply of a profit maximising producer the empirical application explores these issues using panel data of dairy farms in spain

market deregulation trade liberalization and productive efficiency in bangladesh agriculture an empirical analysis the impact of trade liberalization and of market deregulation in general on the performance of agriculture remains contentious and empirical issue in the literature following the random coefficient frontier modelling framework this paper attempts to contribute to this debate by computing the farm specific productive efficiency indices in bangladesh agriculture before and after reform it also examines the impact of some farm specific and policy variables on productive efficiency the empirical results show that there are wide variations in productive efficiency across farms and regions and the average efficiency of all regions increased modestly by 8 percentage points from the pre reform to post reform period the efficiency differentials are largely explained by farm size infrastructure households off farm income and the reduction of government anti agricultural bias in relation to trade and domestic policies the implication of these results suggests the need for further policy reform to augment p

existence and stability of rational expectation equilibria in a simple overlapping generation model abstract we consider a simple overlapping generation model with outside money and one consumption good for a big class of preference relations it is shown that globally no self fulfilling expectation exists except the trivial one if the information set contains only past and present prices even locally positive results can be obtained for homothetic preferences only to get asymptotic stability this class must be restricted again the elasticity of substitution must be very small the implications of this are very negative a learning process can never reach rationality

evaluating the performance of higher education institutions in europe a nonparametric efficiency analysis of 944 institutions abstractalthough a long tradition exists of studying the economics of education performance comparisons of different kinds have traditionally been difficult to undertake an important impediment has been the lack of comparable data to a large extent this study remedies the shortcomings of earlier studies our contribution is twofold first the current higher education policy of contraction and economizing common to most european countries make knowledge of potential efficiency gains crucial second a unique database allows us to study a broad diversity of organizations as well as organizations located in a number of different european countries the study suggests evaluating higher education institution hei performance in a production theory context applying the well known data envelopment analysis dea method to a cross section of 944 heis in 17 european countries the dea approach is particularly suitable in this context where little is known about production technologies and economic behavio

micro adjustment toward long term equilibrium abstract a dynamic model is constructed in which the behavior of economic agents is based on adjustment decisions are made in disequilibrium prices respond to differences between supply and demand inventories capital is moved according to profitability differentials and money is issued by a bank which reacts to the general price level a proof of local stability of long term equilibrium with production prices is demonstrated we further distinguish between two aspects of the stability problem concerning the allocation of capital and relative prices stability in proportions and with respect to the general levels of activity and prices stability in dimension

a generalized production frontier approach for estimating determinants of inefficiency in u s dairy farms this article investigates farm level efficiency of u s dairy farmers by estimating their technical and allocative efficiency technical inefficiency is assumed to be composed of a deterministic component that is a function of some farm specific characteristics and a random component by doing this we extend the stochastic frontier methodology in which determinants of technicial inefficiency are explicitly introduced in the model given the inputs variations in efficiency of farms are then explained by both deterministic and random components of technical inefficiency the empirical results indicate that a levels of education of the farmer are important factors determining technical inefficiency and b large farms are more efficient technically than small and medium sized farms both technical and allocative inefficiency are found to decrease with increase in the level of education of the farmer

slack adjusted dea for time series analysis performance measurement of japanese electric power generation industry in 1984 1993 abstract using a new slack adjusted data envelopment analysis sa dea model which explicitly incorporates an influence of slacks into its efficiency measurement this study discusses a use of various efficiencies and index measures for dea dynamic analysis an analytical formulation to determine the type of return to scale rts is proposed for the new dea model this paper mathematically discusses when multiple solutions occur on rts and how to deal with such a difficulty as an important case study this paper applies the proposed dea approach to examine the performance of japanese electric power generation companies from 1984 to 1993 two policy implications are suggested for guiding the japanese electric power industry

measuring and explaining scale efficiency with the parametric approach the case of greek tobacco growers estimates of technical and scale inefficiencies of tobacco farms in greece during the period 1991 1995 are obtained by using the parametric approach the degree of technical efficiency was found to be lower than the degree of scale efficiency and thus a greater portion of overall inefficiency is due to producing below the production frontier than to producing at an inefficient scale in addition the vast majority of farms in the sample exhibited suboptimal scale implying that output should be expanded to reach the optimal scale empirical results are provided to determine the impact of various socioeconomic demographic and geoclimatic indicators on technical and scale efficiency

regional concentration and efficiency in mexican manufacturing abstract this paper explores the link between industrial location concentration and economic efficiency in mexican manufacturing using a linear programming approach the authors calculate indices of overall technical allocative and scale efficiency for mexican manufacturing industries by state to test whether in 1985 those regions with high levels of industrial concentration were suffering from the costs of congestion the evidence suggests that at least at the aggregate level there continued to be a positive relationship between industry concentration and efficiency in production there is also evidence that overall efficiency was related to scale efficiency although highly industrialized regions on the production frontier often operated at inefficient scales in particular the most concentrated regions the federal district the state of mexico jalisco and nuevo leon consistently display decreasing returns to scale indicating that the process of industrial concentration may be leading to diseconomies of scale finally an econometric analysis suggests that scale urbanization and agglomeration economies are positively related to overall and technical efficiency at the regional level while foreign ownership is negatively related agglomeration economies at the industry level were not significant the paper also makes a methodological contribution it is the first application of a distance function production methodology to measuring regional efficiency in a developing country it demonstrates how to conduct distance function efficiency analysis using the newly developed gams mathematical programming environment these tools should be of considerable interest to applied microeconomists

returns to scale in convex production technologies the notion of returns to scale rts is well established in data envelopment analysis dea in the variable returns to scale production technology the rts characterization is closely related to other scale characteristics such as the scale elasticity most productive scale size mpss and global rts types indicative of the direction to mpss in recent years a number of alternative production technologies have been developed in the dea literature most of these technologies are polyhedral and hence are closed and convex sets examples include technologies with weakly disposable undesirable outputs models with weight restrictions and production trade offs technologies that include several component production processes and network dea models for most of these technologies the relationship between rts and other scale characteristics has remained unexplored the theoretical results obtained in this paper establish such relationships for a very large class of closed convex technologies of which polyhedral technologies are an important example

a nonparametric analysis of agricultural technology u s agricultural technology and technical change are analyzed nonparametrically under cost minimization and profit maximization based on annual data for 1948 83 various separability hypotheses concerning the aggregate production function for u s agriculture are investigated the proposed nonparametric approach also provides some insights into the nature of technical change

the effect of incentive reforms upon productivity evidence from the vietnamese rice industry in this study we use region level panel data on rice production in vietnam to investigate total factor productivity tfp growth in the period since reunification in 1975 two significant reforms were introduced during this period one in 1981 allowing farmers to keep part of their produce and another in 1987 providing improved land tenure we measure tfp growth using two modified forms of the standard malmquist data envelopment analysis dea method which we have named the three year window tyw and the full cumulative fc methods we have developed these methods to deal with degrees of freedom limitations our empirical results indicate strong average tfp growth of between 3 3 and 3 5 per cent per annum with the fastest growth observed in the period following the first reform our results support the assertion that incentive related issues have played a large role in the decline and subsequent resurgence of vietnamese agriculture

frontier production functions and technical efficiency a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics abstract the modelling and estimation of frontier production functions has been an important area of econometric research during the last two decades forsund lovell and schmidt 1980 and schmidt 1986 present reviews of the concepts and models involved and cite some of the empirical applications which had appeared to their respective times of publication this paper seeks to update the econometric modelling of frontier production functions associated with the estimation of technical efficiency of individual firms a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics is an important part of the paper

social efficiency of entry in a vertically related industry we provide a new perspective to the literature on social desirability of entry by showing that if the input supplier has market power social desirability of entry of the final goods producers depends on returns to scale entry in the final goods market can be socially insufficient under constant returns to scale technology but it can be socially excessive under decreasing returns to scale technologies if the cost of entry is low so that the final goods market is sufficiently competitive hence the anti competitive entry regulation policies are more justifiable if the final goods market is characterised by decreasing returns to scale technologies

semi radial technical efficiency measurement semi radial efficiency measurement combines technical efficiency as captured by the classical farrell measure with an economically meaningful mix efficiency component the semi radial evaluation we propose proceeds in two steps first we build on the price interpretation of the generally accepted koopmans efficiency notion to characterize appropriate benchmarks next we present both a quantity based distance measure and its dual price based equivalent to evaluate the mix efficiency factor the type of measures we propose may e g be used to provide a price rationale for the zieschang technical efficiency evaluation procedure

the role of the reference technology in measuring productive efficiency after a twenty year lull the measurement of productive efficiency is enjoying a revival in particular the index of efficiency developed by debreu i95i and later utilised by farrell i957 has received considerable attention these measures have been used fairly extensively in empirical work in both the operations research and economic literature these types of indexes have also appeared in the growing literature on testing for regularity conditions in production e g in afriat i972 diewert and parkan i983 and varian 1984 since the farrell type measure is the focus in this paper a brief review is useful in the farrell framework overall efficiency oe can be decomposed into two multiplicative components allocative efficiency ae and technical efficiency te

measuring technical efficiency in the presence of pesticide spillovers and production uncertainty the case of dutch arable farms pesticides dynamic effects and production uncertainty play an important role in farmers production decisions pesticides have a current production impact through reducing crop damage in the current period and a future impact through impacting the farm biodiversity which alters the future production environment this study presents the difference in inefficiency arising from models that ignore the dynamic effects of pesticides in production decisions and the impact of production uncertainty a dynamic data envelopment analysis dea model is applied to outputs inputs and undesirables of dutch arable farms over the period 2003 2007 a bootstrap approach is used to explain farmers performance providing empirical representations of the impact of stochastic elements on production these empirical representations are used to adjust firms inefficiency scores to incorporate production uncertainty in efficiency evaluation we find that efficiency increased dramatically when a production technology representation that considers both pesticides dynamic impacts and production uncertainty is adopted

alternative treatments of congestion in dea a rejoinder to cooper gu and li abstract this paper is a response to cooper w w b gu and s li comparisons and evaluations of alternative approaches to the treatment of congestion in dea european journal of operational research this issue who claim that the standard fgl procedure by fare grosskopf and lovell for dealing with congestion in dea can i fail to identify congestion when it is present and ii identify congestion when it is not present we clarify the notion of congestion and its relationship to structural efficiency and free disposability respectively to point out that the fgl approach was originally intended for measuring structural efficiency i e the influence of congestion on the efficiency of a particular production unit not for identifying occurrence of congestion in any feasible production vector moreover we point out that the result of cooper et al partially arises from ignorance of some key maintained assumptions underlying the fgl approach further we present some counter examples which demonstrate that the alternative approach advocated by cooper et al can equally fail in identification of congestion finally some remarks on the influence of sampling error and errors in variables on the two stage dea approaches are presented

explaining state bans on corporate farming state laws banning corporate farming present a puzzle for a rent seeking explanation of political outcomes since family farmer proponents may receive no direct benefit from these bans an explanation developed here is that these farmers benefit indirectly forestalling corporate entry preserves the farm political coalition structured around those cooperatives patronized by family farmers and so indirectly preserves federal subsidies and supply restrictions that the incidence of state bans is positively related to the importance of federal farm programs the importance of cooperatives and the homogeneity of farmers within a state is consistent with this indirect rent seeking explanation

walrasian equilibria as limits of noncooperative equilibria part ii pure strategies abstract we examine the connection between walrasian equilibria of a limit economy with infinitesimal firms and noncooperative cournot equilibria of approximating finite economies with significant firms nonconvex production sets decreasing returns in the aggregate and endogenous determination of the number of active firms are allowed a walrasian equilibrium is a limit of pure strategy noncooperative equilibria only if a condition loosely analogous to downward sloping demand in the partial equilibrium constant returns to scale case holds the condition is also sufficient to guarantee the existence of a robust sequence of pure strategy noncooperative equilibria which converges to the walrasian equilibrium

impacts of trade liberalizations under the uruguay round on the world sugar market the impacts of the uruguay round policy provisions on the world sugar market show that these policies will stabilize the world sugar price at slightly higher levels than in the baseline global sugar consumption will increase as a result of the income growth caused by the uruguay round economic resources will be allocated more efficiently among the sugar industries of the various countries however the impacts on the sugar industries in countries with strong producer supports will be rather small because the negotiation process of the uruguay round has accommodated the changes in sugar policies already implemented by individual countries in the past few years low cost sugar producing countries will benefit from the higher world sugar price and consumers in countries with protected markets will benefit from lower domestic prices

measuring technical efficiency and productivity growth a comparison of sfa and dea on norwegian grain production data this article compares data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to assess efficiency and productivity growth of norwegian grain producers previous studies have dealt with either one of them and less of both for the assessment of productivity growth or regress malmquist productivity indices are derived from both approaches the data cover a 10 year period we find consistency between the approaches to the extent that 1 there are potentials for efficiency improvements but the magnitudes depends on the model applied and by segmentation of the data set 2 there has been a productivity improvement in the sector on average in the interval 30 38 in the period studied and 3 technical change has had the greatest impact on productivity indicating that producers have a tendency to catch up with the front runners in general policy makers are warned not to be indifferent with respect to the approach used for efficiency and productivity measurement as these may give different results

entry and price dynamics in a perfect foresight model abstract this paper studies firms entry and price dynamics in a model that combines the assumptions of free entry and perfect foresight with the hypothesis of consumer s loyalty postulated by phelps and winter the analysis of the transition to long run equilibrium reveals that in such a model the entry of firms is related to the difference between current prices and costs in relation to the growth of the firms output it is shown that the model is consistent with gibrat s law finally it is shown that the size distribution of firms approaches asymptotically a pareto distribution

the relative technical efficiency of northern and southern u s farms in 1860 prior to the 1960s it was widely accepted that the slave economy of the south was unprofitable and inefficient 14 however in the 1960s a number of scholars demonstrated using economic analysis and econometric techniques that slavery was indeed profitable 5 12 this evidence was further supported by findings that per capita income in the south was not only high by standards of the mid nineteenth century but was also growing rapidly during the two decades preceding the civil war 7 8 9 although these findings were important they did not address the issue of the technical efficiency of northern and southern farms however in the early 1970s fogel and engerman determined that southern agriculture was more technically efficient than northern agriculture 11 13 this paper will also compare the relative technical efficiency of northern and southern farms for a sample of farms for the year 1860 however the method we will use to measure technical efficiency is superior to that used by fogel and engerman a non parametric production frontier is constructed with inefficiency measured by the extent to which firms operate below the frontier using this approach it is possible to determine whether technical inefficiency is the result of operating off of the isoquant pure technical inefficiency or operating at an inappropriate scale i e not operating at constant returns to scale the next section of this paper reviews the literature concerning the relative technical efficiency of northern relative to southern agriculture section three discusses the methodology used in this paper to measure the technical efficiency of farms section four presents and analyzes the empirical results and section five summarizes the paper

accounting for slacks to measure and decompose revenue efficiency in the spanish designation of origin wines with dea abstract in this paper we show how data envelopment analysis dea may be used to measure and decompose revenue inefficiency taking into account all sources of technical waste in the context of an application to assess the spanish quality wine sector in particular designation of origin do wines we try to go beyond the standard approaches which use shephard distance functions or directional distance functions to provide decomposition that incorporates slacks as a source of technical inefficiency to accomplish this we will base our analysis on a recent approach introduced in cooper et al 2011a in particular we show how an output oriented version of the weighted additive model can be used to properly identify revenue technical and allocative inefficiencies in spanish dos in the application we conclude that the main source of revenue inefficiency in this sector is technical waste and that cava can be highlighted as the do that performs as a benchmark for more numbers of units

bubbles and crashes gradient dynamics in financial markets abstract fund managers respond to the payoff gradient by continuously adjusting leverage in our analytic and simulation models the base model has a stable equilibrium with classic properties however bubbles and crashes occur in extended models incorporating an endogenous market risk premium based on investors historical losses and constant gain learning when losses have been small for a long time asset prices inflate as fund managers increase leverage then slight losses can trigger a crash as a widening risk premium accelerates deleveraging and asset price declines

farm size productivity and returns to scale in agriculture revisited a case study of wine producers in south africa abstract the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity has almost become a stylised fact in the economic development literature most of the studies contributing to this preception have been flawed by methodological shortcomings and the request is that these studies be treated with caution using recent farm survey data from the wine producing areas of the western cape of south africa this study attempts to overcome some of the methodological problems distinguishing between partial and total productivity measures using data envelopment analysis most of the wine grape producers were found to operate under constant returns to scale co operative membership seemed to overcome the economies of scale associated with processing and marketing the inverse relationship between farm size and both land productivity and total factor productivity is weak not consistently negative and differs between regions thus caution must be used when advocating rural development policies based on the inevitability of an inverse relationship existing in all sectors and production regions of agriculture