This article establishes the cost-efficiency frontier and its variation over time for a sample of 610 farms in Kansas for ten consecutive years, from 1995 to 2004. The primary objective consists of examining how financially constrained firms affect cost efficiency and its components, allocative,...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/16/05.

This paper examines the relationship between overall efficiency and years of farm experience for a sample of Kansas farms. In addition to years of experience, overall efficiency is significantly related to farm size, percent of time devoted to farming, and percent acres owned.

Using the non-parametric linear programming approach, this study examines overall efficiency gains due to diversification between crop and livestock enterprises for a sample of Kansas farms. Overall efficiency gains were decomposed into scope efficiency gains and scale efficiency gains. Farms...

This paper examines the impact of specialization on the cost efficiency of a sample of crop and beef farms in Kansas. The economic total expense ratio was used to measure cost efficiency. The relationship between the economic total expense ratio and specialization was not significant.

This paper examined crop machinery investment and cost benchmarks for a sample of Kansas farms. Crop machinery benchmarks varied widely among the farms. On average, crop machinery investment and cost were $227 and $82, respectively. Crop machinery investment and cost were significantly...

Agriculture has seen several periods of both high and low farmer profitability. This has resulted in at least some farmers leaving agriculture because of financial difficulty. Other farmers, however, have managed to survive the bust periods of agriculture and are still farming today. This paper...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the financial performance of a sample of crop/beef cow farms using the operating profit margin ratio and farm growth as relevant measures. Farms were divided into four performance categories: low profit/low growth; low profit/high growth; high profit/low...

This study investigates the impact of risk preferences on economic efficiency scores. Risk averse individuals may be less likely to adopt new technologies and have lower production levels than individuals with other risk preferences. Nonparametric techniques are used to estimate cost and revenue...

We use nonparametric production function methods to decompose farm-level labor productivity growth into components attributable to efficiency change, technical change, and factor intensity. The estimation is accomplished using balanced panel data drawn from the Kansas Farm Management Association...