Most developed countries support farming activities through policies that are tailored to meet their specific social, economic and environmental objectives. Economic and environmental efficiency have recently become relevant targets of most of these policies, whose sound implementation can be...

This article studies the influence of risk on farms’ technical efficiency levels. The analysis extends the order-m efficiency scores approach proposed by Daraio and Simar (2005) to the state-contingent framework. The empirical application focuses on cross section data of Catalan specialized...

The concept of technical efficiency is critical to measuring the firm performance, determining the degree of innovative technology adoption and the overall production efficiency. Traditionally, technical efficiency has been measured as the ratio of observed output to maximum feasible output....

This paper analyses the impact of food safety information about the 'mad-cow' crisis on the demand for different types of fresh meat and fish in Spain. The theoretical model explicitly incorporates food safety information in the consumers' utility function, from which demand equations are...

Spain occupies the first position in the European and Mediterranean rankings of citrus production and trade. In our analysis we assess the technical efficiency with which this sector is operating. The main objective of this study is to analyze productivity and technical efficiency of Spanish...

The arable crop sector (COP) occupies a prominent position within the European Union’s agricultural sector. Within Spain, the COP sector accounts for almost a third of total Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund expenses, and a half of the utilised agricultural area. The COP sector is not...

Previous literature on volatility links between food and energy prices is scarce and mainly based on parametric approaches. We assess this issue by using a semiparametric GARCH model recently proposed by Long et al. (2009), which is essentially a nonparametric correction of the parametric...

Multivariate local linear regression and parametric error correction models are applied to assess price linkages and price transmission patterns between food and energy prices in Spain. Weekly biodiesel, sunflower and crude oil prices observed from November 2006 to October 2010 are used in the...

Previous research has ignored the influence of inputs on output risk when assessing the effects of decoupled income-support payments on production decisions. This paper studies the impacts of agricultural policy decoupling on output variability and mean by explicitly considering the influence of...

Our paper seeks to assess the decision to adopt organic farming practices. More specifically, we use Duration Analysis (DA) to determine why farmers adopt organic farming and the timing of adoption. We extend previous studies by including farmers’ objectives, risk preferences and agricultural...