Research on productive efficiency at the firm level has developed as an important and active strand of research the last decades, both within operations research, management science and economics. However, the interests pursued within the fields have had some differences regarding sound...

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...

The modelling of the interaction between production activities and the natural environment requires formulating a multioutput production function for intended and unintended outputs. The key feature when modelling joint production of intended outputs and unintended residuals is that the latter...

Studies of productivity growth of institutions of higher education is of interest for two main reasons; education is an important factor for productivity growth of the economy, and in countries where higher education is funded by the public sector accountability of resource use is of key...

We propose a two-stage procedure for finding realistic benchmarks for nonparametric efficiency analysis. On the first stage the efficient DMUs are figured out by a free disposal hull approach. These benchmarks are directly targeted by directional distance functions and the extent of inefficiency...

The generation of unintended residuals in the production of intended outputs is the key factor behind our serious problems with pollution. The way this joint production is modelled is therefore of crucial importance for our understanding and empirical efforts to change economic activities in...

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...