A production function highly concave in inputs will have a dual profit function less convex in prices. Even large variations in prices will cause little variation in input usage and output, resulting in poor profit function estimates. This is demonstrated using Monte Carlo simulation with...

Buy-sell arrangements for the death of a co-owner may be funded with life insurance. The mechanisms and details of buy-sell arrangements were discussed. The decision whether to use life insurance was modeled using the expected utility theorem. State dependent utility was used since a surviving...

A Box-Cox functional form was estimated from corn-nitrogen data previously used to report optimal nitrogen use from a quadratic production function. Results suggest that less nitrogen should be app1ie.d than recommended using the quadratic function, but with more nitrogen being applied if poor...

In a competitive market dairy production will shift to that region which is the most productive. Thus, this paper reports the measurement of productivity of dairy production in the various states of the U.S. using recent Census data and non-parametric Malmquist index techniques. These are total...

The price and quantity effects of a forthcoming biotechnology product, bovine growth hormone (bGH), are explored in a simple partial equilibrium model. The model is based on previous theoretical work on technological change but is developed in terms of a sector output. A particular output curve...

The technical efficiencies of New York dairy farms were estimated using a frontier production function. The average farm was 69 percent efficient. Individual farm efficiency was regressed on variables not considered inputs to explain why a farm was not on the frontier. Favorable location in the...

Monte-Carlo simulation of nonparametric efficiency shows that even when the number of firms is large, defining ten or more inputs results in most firms being measured as efficient. Comparison of the simulated results with any empirical results may suggest that the dimension of the problem,...

Short-run and long-run technical and allocative efficiencies were computed for 395 New York dairy farms using data envelopment or nonparametric procedures on 1990 Dairy Farm Business Summary data. The farms were, on average, more allocatively efficient in the short run than in the long run, but...

Productivity of U.S. farmers by age is measured by non-parametric programming using 1992 Census data, decomposed into efficiency and technology Malmquist index components. Productivity increases slightly with age and then decreases. In most states productivity variations are from technology use...