An Introduction to Efficiency and Productivity Analysis is designed as a primer for anyone seeking an authoritative introduction to efficiency and productivity analysis. It is a systematic treatment of four relatively new methodologies in Efficiency/Production Analysis: (a) Least-Squares...

Agglomeration externalities can have positive effects on both the production possibility frontier and technical inefficiency of firms. Increased levels of localized knowledge spillovers and substitution of internal inputs with external inputs may lead to fewer errors in decision-making and...

Allocations of research funds across programs are often made for efficiency reasons. Social science research is shown to have small, lagged but significant effects on U.S. agricultural efficiency when public agricultural R&D and extension are simultaneously taken into account. Farm management...

The estimated parameters of output distance functions frequently violate the monotonicity, quasi-convexity and convexity constraints implied by economic theory, leading to estimated elasticities and shadow prices that are incorrectly signed, and ultimately to perverse conclusions concerning the...

Recent empirical studies have found significant evidence of departures from competition in the input side of the bread,breakfast cereal and margarine end-product markets. In this study we specify a general duality model of profitmaximisation that allows for imperfect competition in the input and...

Profitability change can be decomposed into the product of a total factor productivity (TFP) index and an index measuring changes in relative prices. Many TFP indexes can be further decomposed into measures of technical change, technical efficiency change, scale efficiency change and mix...

Wool tenderness is a significant problem in Australia, especially in areas where sheep graze under highly seasonal conditions. In this study, a duality-based modeling framework is implemented to assess the economic impact of staple strength-enhancing research on the profits of Australian...

Systems of equations comprising cost functions and first-order derivative equations are often used to estimate characteristics of production technologies. Unfortunately, many estimated systems violate the regularity conditions implied by economic theory. Sampling theory methods can be used to...