A review of crop-insurance schemes is followed by a discussion of a guaranteed-yield, crop-insurance plan. General formulae for the distribution function and mathematical expectation of indemnities for the insurance plan are presented in terms of the distribution of crop yields. Three special...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of the deregulation of the Swedish banking industry in the mid-1980s, and the consequent banking crisis, on productive efficiency and productivity growth in the industry. An unbalanced panel of Swedish banks is studied over the period, 1984 to...

This paper uses cross-sectional data collected from 375 smallholder yam farmers in Ghana in 2010 to examine whether the adoption of yam minisett technology had an effect on the technical efficiency of production of the yam farmers. We correct for endogeneity in adoption and employ stochastic...

This paper considers a stochastic metafrontier function to investigate the technical efficiencies of firms in different groups that may not have the same technology. A decomposition of output is presented involving the technology gap and technical efficiency ratios for firms in a group relative...

The modelling and estimation of frontier production functions has been an important area of econometric research during the last two decades. Forsund, Lovell and Schmidt (1980) and Schmidt (1986) present reviews of the concepts and models involved and cite some of the empirical applications...

After the financial crisis in 1997, the Thai government established and promoted financial services to rural areas to improve the quality of life of rural households and increase the productivity and technical efficiency of farmers. This paper seeks to investigate the impact of financial...