measuring excess capital capacity in agricultural production we introduce the concept excess capital capacity and employ a stochastic input requirement frontier to measure excess capital capacity in agricultural production we also propose a two step estimation method that allows endogenous regressors in stochastic frontier models the first step uses generalized method of moments to get consistent estimates of the frontier parameters in the presence of endogenous regressors the second step uses maximum likelihood to measure excess capital capacity and evaluate the factors that influence it the empirical application to dutch cash crop farms found varying degrees of excess capital capacity the policy implications of excess capital capacity are discussed

productivity in swedish electricity retail distribution this paper examines productivity growth in electricity retail distribution in sweden in a multiple output multiple input framework the approach used is nonparametric data envelopment analysis dea productivity is measured by means of the malmquist index productivity comparisons are made between different types of ownership and between different service areas the study indicates a high rate of productivity growth due to economies of density when measured over a period of 17 years the results show no significant differences in productivity growth between different types of ownership or economic organization

the effect of off farm work on the intensity of agricultural production changes in agricultural production methods have been associated with environmental pressure and a loss of natural habitats this paper explores the extent to which farmer participation in off farm work an increasing phenomenon in most developed countries changes the intensity of agricultural input use focusing in particular on fertilizer and crop protection product use a sample selection model that accounts for both unobserved heterogeneity between farms and the potential simultaneity between farm operations and hours worked off farm is estimated for 2 419 farms in england and wales the econometric evidence indicates that the input intensity of products which have well established links to environmental damage can increase as well as decrease the results suggest that that fertilizer intensity may decline as off farm labor increases while the use of crop protection per hectare increases as off farm work increases

off farm work decisions of husbands and wives joint decision making theoretical and econometric models are developed to examine joint wage labor participation and hours decisions of a husband and wife in farm households the econometric model is multiple equation and recursive the specification of the off farm labor supply equation of the husband wife depends on whether his her wife husband does or does not work off the farm and this structure is endogenous the model is fitted to data for iowa farm households the main conclusion is that the off farm labor supply equation of a married individual differs significantly depending on whether his or her spouse also works for a wage copyright 1989 by mit press

relative performance of public and private ownership under yardstick competition electricity retail distribution abstract this paper focuses on productive efficiency in swedish retail electricity distribution during 1970 1990 using hedonic output s constructed from physical outputs and their qualities and network characteristics the main focus is on efficiency of privately owned municipal utilities municipal companies and companies with mixed ownerships three different approaches are used to examine whether ownership of the distribution companies has any systematic impact on the above issues we also examine returns to scale and technical change empirical results from the three alternative approaches show that privately owned companies are relatively more efficient we find evidence of scale economies and technical progress

labour use efficiency in swedish social insurance offices this paper considers the estimation of frontier production functions in panel data models it proposes a multi stage method to obtain estimates of 1 the parameters of a flexible input requirement function and 2 technical inefficiency decomposed into time invariant firm specific time varying and the residual components the proposed method is used to analyse labour use efficiency of swedish local social insurance offices on the basis of a large panel of observations during the time period 1974 84 empirical results show 1 substantial variations in labour use efficiency among these offices with the mean efficiencies declining over time 2 presence of economies of scale thereby meaning that most of the offices were of suboptimal size

short run and long run performance of international tourism evidence from bayesian dynamic models abstract measuring the technical efficiency of the tourism industry is essential for evaluating tourism sustainability and reshaping tourism activities this paper introduces for the first time a new dynamic stochastic frontier model to 1 measure and compare the short run and long run technical efficiencies of leading tourism destinations and 2 provide impulse response functions and persistence measures to trace out the dynamic effect of shocks in technical inefficiency we develop our model in a bayesian framework using carefully constructed markov chain monte carlo mcmc techniques we report efficiency results and persistence scores for individual destinations and discuss how different destinations recover from shocks in tourism performance

a life cycle consistent empirical model of family labour supply using cross section data this paper estimates a utility maximising model of the joint determination of male and female labour supplies using a sample of married couples from the u k family expenditure survey the emphasis is on the estimation of within period preferences that are consistent with intertemporal two stage budgeting under uncertainty however the approach we adopt provides an alternative method of estimating certain aspects of life cycle behaviour to the fixed effects constant approach of heckman and macurdy 1980 macurdy 1981 and browning deaton and irish 1985 moreover it relaxes some of the underlying restrictions that are implicit in these constant models under uncertainty

the supply of off farm labor a random coefficients approach a joint model of off farm labor decisions for farm operator and spouse is presented attention is given to operator and spouse participation decisions as well as associated problems of multiple sample selectivity biases two stage fixed and random coefficient methods corrected for possible selectivity biases are used to estimate supply function parameters results indicate that supply function parameters are random variation in important supply parameters is investigated results also illustrate the importance of spouse decisions on off farm labor supply function structure

multiple job holdings among dairy farm families in new york and ontario abstract previous empirical studies of multiple job holding have tended to focus on the characteristics of those obtaining off farm employment and the factors affecting the hours supplied to those obtaining off farm activities none of these studies have explicitly addressed the reasons behind the decision to seek off farm employment neither have they been able to examine in depth the important issue of how this major component of the farm sector responds to alternative policies since most studies have used cross sectional data for a given region a comparison between countries would permit the analysis of how multiple job holding responds to differing government policies the purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons for and factors affecting multiple job holdings of dairy farm families in neighboring regions of two counties united states and canada the bordering regions of new york and ontario have similar geographic conditions but significantly different farm support and social service policies the results indicate the importance of farm income on why people work off the farm and provide evidence of multiple job holding as a flexible mechanism for coping with changes in the economic environment facing the household for operators the driving characteristics influencing off farm labor participation is the farm s financial position the supply managed milk marketing system ensures higher and more stable returns for ontario dairy farm labor in contrast it is family demographics educational level and social support policy that appears to largely influence spousal off farm employment decisions free medical care in ontario lowers the reservation wage for household members the effect of these farm and social support policies on the relative returns to labor in agriculture and non farm employment explains the lower participation rate and hours supplied in off farm work by both operators and hours supplied in off farm work by both operators and spouses in ontario dairy farm household

property rights versus public spirit ownership and efficiency of u s electric utilities prior to rate of return regulation for over a century american economists have been engaged in a vigorous theoretical and empirical debate over the economic performance of publicly owned versus privately owned electric utilities the authors review the historical debate and use micro data collected by the u s commissioner of labor in 1897 98 to construct efficiency measures based on a nonparametric frontier production function since this is prior to state rate of return regulation regulatory effects do not confound the analysis the authors find that publicly owned electric utilities were significantly more efficient than their privately owned counterparts copyright 1991 by mit press

collective labor supply and welfare the paper develops a general collective model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own possibly altruistic preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be pareto efficient an alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process agents first share nonlabor income according to some given sharing rule then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption this setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies moreover the observation of labor supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule up to a constant finally the traditional tools of welfare analysis can be adapted to the new setting

non parametric efficiency progress and regress measures for panel data methodological aspects this purely methodological paper deals with the role of time in non parametric efficiency analysis using both fdh and dea technologies it first shows how each observation in a panel can be characterized in efficiency terms vis a vis three different kinds of frontiers i contemporaneous ii sequential and iii intertemporal these are then compared with window analysis next frontier shifts outward and inward interpreted as progress or regress are considered for the two kinds of technologies and computational methods are described in detail for evaluating such shifts in either case these are also contrasted with what is measured by the malmquist productivity index finally an alternative way of identifying progress and regress independent of the frontier notion and referring instead to some benchmark notion is extended here to panel data

local economic conditions and wage labor decisions of farm and rural nonfarm couples effects of geographical differences in local economic conditions on wage labor demand and wage labor participation decisions of rural couples are examined for current population survey households 1978 82 wage premiums are shown to exist for localities anticipating labor demand growth higher unemployment rates larger share of employment in services and higher costs of living these effects are stronger for males than females effects of local economic conditions on the probability of wage work are consistent with expected market wage and reservation wage effects and for farm households the probability of wage work increases when expected farm output prices decline or the wage increases

a test of the unitary and collective models of household labour supply this paper tests the unitary and the collective household labour supply models within a structural framework a nonlinear unrestricted household labour supply system is postulated and the set of parametric restrictions imposed by each model is derived our results generally reject the income pooling restrictions embodied in the unitary model also the symmetry of cross wage effects is rejected however the collective model is not rejected for groups with no pre school children

the impact of coupled and decoupled government subsidies on off farm labor participation of u s farm operators with the 1996 farm act the united states introduced payments that were designed to be decoupled labor allocation choices are likely to be affected by receipt of payments and income from off farm jobs has been the major source of income for most farm households for sometime this article examines whether the 1996 change has affected the off farm labor participation of farm households we conclude that the observed increase in off farm participation of farm operators who received payments was not the result of the 1996 policy change government payments whether coupled or decoupled have a negative effect on off farm labor participation

additive general error models for production cost and derived demand or share systems many empirical studies of production specify a deterministic model of the firm derive the implied behavioral equations input demand or share system and then embed this system in a stochastic framework by tacking on linear error terms in contrast this paper proposes general error models gems in which the error specification is an integral part of the optimization model these models are the statistical embodiment of stigler s view that apparent observed inefficiencies reflect the investigator s ignorance of the true optimization problem additive gems are proposed and interpreted specification tests indicate that a translog additive gem is superior to the standard translog specification

corruption and inefficiency theory and evidence from electric utilities we investigate the determinants of the efficiency of firms with a focus on the role of corruption we construct a simple theoretical model where corruption increases factor requirements of firms because it diverts managerial effort away from factor coordination we then exploit a unique dataset comprising firm level information on 80 electricity distribution firms from 13 latin american countries for the years 1994 to 2001 as predicted by the model we find that more corruption in the country is strongly associated with more inefficient firms in the sense that they employ more inputs to produce a given level of output the economic magnitude of the effects is large the results hold both in models with country and firm fixed effects the results survive several robustness checks including different measures of output and efficiency and instrumenting for corruption other elements associated with inefficiency are public ownership inflation and lack of law and order but corruption appears to play a separate and more robust role

the relative efficiency of public and private firms in a regulated environment the case of u s electric utilities abstract the relative efficiency of privately owned and publicly owned electric utilities is investigated using theoretical and econometric models that allow for the effects of both ownership type and regulation the estimation results indicate that the two types of firms are equally cost inefficient in the united states the average effect of inefficiency is to increase the cost of production by 2 4 percent holding output constant inefficiency increases the average quantities demanded of capital and labor and decreases the average quantity demanded of fuel

nonresponse in panel data the impact on estimates of a life cycle consumption function if missing observations in a panel data set are not missing at random many widely applied estimators may be inconsistent in this paper we examine empirically several ways to reveal the nature and severity of the selectivity problem due to nonresponse as well as a number of methods to estimate the resulting models using a life cycle consumption function and data from the expenditure index panel from the netherlands we discuss simple procedures that can be used to assess whether observations are missing at random and we consider more complicated estimation procedures that can be used to obtain consistent or efficient estimates in case of selectivity of attrition bias finally some attention is paid to the differences in identification consistency and efficiency between inferences from a single wave of the panel a balanced sub panel and an unbalanced panel

interrelated labor decisions of farm couples a censored response analysis of off farm work farm couples labor market responses are partly the discrete choice of entering the off farm labor market and partly the continuous choice of off farm working hours given entry such a setting is interesting when examining the increasing occurrence of multiple job holdings among farmers in western economies most existing analyses of off farm labor supply only model the decisions of the farmer not the joint decisions of the farm couple this article presents a framework for handling such interrelated discrete continuous choices involving also farm production and household consumption the derived two equation sub model for husband wife s censored labor responses is estimated from a 10 year norwegian panel data for 342 farms the results agree to some extent with earlier studies but are more informative because of the longer panels which allows a more extensive examination of latent heterogeneity and behavioral persistence because it provides cross effects in the spouses labor supplies the results show some interesting differences between how the independent variables influence the labor supply of operator and spouse this is most evident for the cross effects of education children and wage rate overall the results strongly support applying a panel censoring model that accounts for latent heterogeneity in this context

time allocation between farm and off farm activities in israeli farm households this paper examines the time allocation of israeli farm families between farm work and off farm work we found that extended families behave differently than nuclear families people in families with adult children or siblings of the farm couple tend to work more off the farm and less on the farm while people in families with parents tend to work less both on and off the farm we also found that farm land and capital do not affect time allocation once we control for the productive structure of the farm the private arab and jewish farm families behave differently than families in moshavim perhaps due to institutional factors cultural background and or labor market discrimination