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...

Twenty-one pastoralists in the West Darling region of New South Wales were interviewed to gain an understanding of the attitudes of managers in this high-risk pastoral area to uncertain prospects. It was found that pastoralists had no difficulty in specifying subjective probabilities but in...

This paper presents a metafrontier production function model for firms in different groups having different technologies. The metafrontier model enables the calculation of comparable technical efficiencies for firms operating under different technologies. The model also enables the technology...

In livestock feeding experiments the problem of recursiveness arises because the quantity of feed consumed by an animal is a function of its past history of feeding. The problem is most acute where experiments are designed to analyse sub ad lib feeding. The analysis of such experiments...

The significance of statistical lack-of-fit tests for hypothesized response functions describing experimental data is traced in some of the recent agricultural economics literature. The statistical test is reviewed in a regression framework and it is shown that the test is related to testing...

This paper considers a statistical model for a production frontier that is consistent with the traditional (nonstochastic) definition of a production function given in microeconomic theory. Limiting cases of the model are the familiar average production function and an envelope production...

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...

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...