A broad literature seeks to assess the importance of schools, proxies for school quality, andfamily background on children's achievement growth using the education production function.Using rich data from the Philippines, we introduce and estimate a model that imposes littlestructure on the...

When adjustment costs are present, cyclical preference and technology heterogeneities in aproduct’s markets induce cycles in production. We exploit cyclic and dihedral groupinvariances in an industry’s cost technology to describe these patterns. We show whenequilibrium cyclical pricing and...

In this paper we examine the relation between geographic location and innovative behavior.Knowledge spillins, as opposed to knowledge spillovers, are modeled as an externality which existsbetween geographically close economic agents and enters the representative inventor productionfunction...

This paper applies production theory to define a new set of inputs for U.S. households for thepost-war II period, tests the new inputs to see if they support a complete household-demandsystem, and reports a new social cost-of-living index. The data support a demand system withnine major input...

We study business organization and coordination of specialty-market hog production using a comparative analysis of two Iowa pork niche-marketing firms. We describe and analyze each firm's management of five key organizational challenges: planning and logistics, quality assurance, process...

Using a unique longitudinal data set on all manufacturing firms in Slovenia from 1994-2001, this study analyzes how firm efficiency changed in response to changing competitive pressures associated with the transition to market. Results show that the period was one of atypically rapid growth of...

Air/odor issues related to livestock production have received much attention recently. Thisattention has come from many fronts - policy makers, media, state residents, and agribusinessincluding livestock producers. While the discussions have been frequent and regulations havebeen instituted,...

Year round grazing systems that utilize stockpiled forage and/or crop residue are oftenpromoted as a way for Northern and Western cow-calf producers to reduce winterfeeding costs and improve overall profitability. This study compared the profitability of aconventional spring calving/summer...

This paper examines how the effort choices of workers within the same firm interact witheach other. In contrast to the existing literature, we show that workers can affect theproductivity of their co-workers based on income maximization considerations, rather thanrelying on behavioral...

How can we measure and compare the relative performance of production units?If input and output variables are one dimensional, then the simplest way is tocompute efficiency by calculating and comparing the ratio of output and inputfor each production unit. This idea is inappropriate though, when...