Our contribution in this article is to compare two methods of adjusting agricultural productivity estimates for the effects of bad environmental outputs. One method is a direct non-parametric Malmquist index with the environmental variables include. The other method is to use the shadow prices...

Traditional measures of agricultural productivity only incorporate those inputs and outputs that are recorded in market transactions. However, such measures do not account for externalities such as environmental damage. This study uses an output distance function framework to estimate a...

Economic viability of the US corn ethanol industry depends on prices, technical and economic efficiency of plants and on continuation of policy support. Public policy support is tied to the environmental efficiency of plants measured as their impact on emissions of greenhouse gases. This study...

In this study we use data envelopment analysis to decompose the overall economic efficiency of a sample of ethanol plants into three subcomponents: technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and a new component we call marketing efficiency. The relative importance of these sources of efficiency...

Price volatility and policy changes may compromise the ability of corn ethanol plants to operate above average variable cost and avoid shutdown. This study derives a variable cost function capable of accommodating two features of ethanol plants; 1) some inputs are used in fixed proportions and...

This study has estimates a Fourier flexible production frontier to examine agricultural productivity in forty-one sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries during 1961-1999. The primary empirical result is that only nine of these countries experienced productivity improvements, while average...

Traditional measures of the benefits of technological change use producer prices. Consumer-oriented measures are more appropriate but they require knowledge of price impacts. They may diverge in the presence of distortions. This paper shows that in general equilibrium they are interrelated...

Traditional Total factor productivity [TFP] misrepresents the true change in agricultural productivity because environmental bads jointly produced with desirable outputs are unaccounted. Nonparametric measures incorporating environmental bads support the hypothesis that prior [after] to 1980's...

This paper considers the time path of prices for crop traits such as herbicide resistance, specifically whether they conform to Coase's conjecture that monopoly prices can't be sustained on durables. While property rights determine whether such traits are durables, prices for RR soybeans and Bt...