Technical efficiency of Kansas arable crop farms: a local maximum likelihood approach

The present study uses local maximum likelihood (LML) methods recently proposed by Kumbhakar et al. (2007) to assess the technical efficiency of arable crop Kansas farms. LML techniques overcome the most relevant limitations associated to mainstream parametric stochastic frontier models. Results suggest that Kansas farms reach technical efficiency levels on the order of 90%. These results are compared with another flexible efficiency assessment alternative: the deterministic data envelopment analysis (DEA).