Replaced with revised version of paper 07/29/09.

Little attention has been given in the agricultural economics literature to the impact of off-farm work on farm productivity and efficiency. More knowledge about what determines part-time farming and whether farm productivity and efficiency are affected by part-time farming could help policy...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the regional productivity differentials on dairy farms in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Several methods have been suggested for analysing productivity differentials in agriculture between groups of farms or countries. Hayami [5] and Hayami and Ruttan [7]...

The economic efficiency of 68 Ecuadorian dairy farms is investigated by estimating technical, allocative, and scale efficiencies for each using stochastic frontier methodology. Empirical results show that technical inefficiency exists for all of these farms – ranging from 11.8% to 12.8%....

This paper examines the impact of regulatory reform on the performance of Spanish savings banks. To this end it uses panel data for the period 1986-1995 and a flexible variable profit function that incorporates time-varying technical efficiency. The focus is whether increased competition brought...

It is generally believed that the structural reforms that were introduced in India following the macro-economic crisis of 1991 ushered in competition and forced companies to become more efficient. However, whether the post-1991 growth is an outcome of more efficient use of resources or greater...

In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect technical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely external non-economic) as well as...

The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of corporate R&D activities on firms' performance, measured by labour productivity. To this end, the stochastic frontier technique is applied, basing the analysis on a unique unbalanced longitudinal dataset consisting of 532 top...

This paper analyzes the evolution of Swiss farm productivity during the implementation of environmental policy reforms. We employ a production model formulation with technology parameters defined as the functions of subsidies, as well as individual farm characteristics. Our estimates for two...

We use the indirect production function approach in the stochastic frontier framework to estimate separately the output losses due to the presence of a budget constraint and technical inefficiency. We develop a methodology for estimating the severity and testing the significance of the...