Unobserved heterogeneity in productivity analysis of panel data : applications to meat chain firms and global growth in agriculture

Production analysis matters in agricultural economics because technology shapes developments in agriculture as well as in related sectors, such as the food industry. Pro- ductivity and technical efficiency (TE) are key aspects in this context. In empirical analysis, inefficiency can be confounded with unmeasured attributes. As panel data are used to analyse productivity trends, it is possible to account for unobserved hetero- geneity. However, in the context of efficiency analysis, estimation of the corresponding stochastic frontier (SF) model is a challenge. Several econometric methods hav...