Several studies have focused attention on the differences between organic and conventional farms in terms of efficiency, and controversial findings have resulted from these applications. One source of controversy concerns the assumption about the frontier(s) adopted for the comparison: a common...

Agricultural inputs are peculiar in nature as an asymmetry in their roles can be identified during the production process. These inputs can be grouped into a set of growth inputs or a set of facilitating inputs. The inputs affecting biological or physiological growth from the inside of the plant...

A growth accounting exercise is conducted for 88 countries for 1960-94 to examine the source of cross-country differences in total factor productivity (TFP) levels. Two differences distinguish this analysis from that of the related literature. First, the critical technology parameter-the share...

The paper offers a proof that expected utility maximisation with logarithmic utility is a dominant preference in the biological selection process in the sense that a population following any other preference for decision-making under risk will, with a probability that approaches certainty,...

By applying a stochastic production frontier approach to the matching process of unemployed and vacancies, this paper provides novel detailed insights into the process of job creation. For different labor markets as defined by occupation and region, the methodology produces estimates of the...

We evaluate the determinants of matching efficiency changes through a stochastic Cobb-Douglas production frontier model extended to allow the efficiency coefficient to depend on variables meant to capture workers and firms characteristics. We apply this methodology to examine regional...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of the East German economy at the firm level using an unbalanced panel over the transition period 1994 to 1998. We adopt a translog stochastic frontier model to estimate technical efficiency in eastern and western Germany. The results...

Output and input market distortions manifest as wedges in the firm's first order conditions. The production approach to markup estimation recovers the markup wedge using the output elasticity for a variable and undistorted input. We show that using the revenue elasticity for any variable input,...