The paper investigates the impact of subsidies and of para-agriculture on the technical efficiency of organic farms in Switzerland, Austria and Southern Germany. The data-set consists of bookkeeping data with 1,704 observations in the years 2003 to 2005. Technical efficiency is modelled using a...

When analyzing what determines the efficiency of production, regressing efficiency scores estimated by DEA on explanatory variables has much intuitive appeal. Simar and Wilson (2007) show that this nai͏̈ve two-stage estimation procedure suffers from severe flaws, that render its results, and...

This paper explores the consequences for parametric and non-parametric efficiency levels and rankings when using grouped instead of individual Decision Making Units (DMU). The bias results due to the differences of the grouped DMUs frontier compared to the individual DMUs frontier. Monte Carlo...

In this paper we compare two flexible estimators of technical efficiency in a cross-sectional setting: the nonparametric kernel SFA estimator of Fan, Li and Weersink (1996) to the nonparametric bias corrected DEA estimator of Kneip, Simar and Wilson (2008). We assess the finite sample...

Production analysis matters in agricultural economics because technology shapes developments in agriculture as well as in related sectors, such as the food industry. Pro- ductivity and technical efficiency (TE) are key aspects in this context. In empirical analysis, inefficiency can be...