Technical change in general milk processing is estimated within a homothetic frontier production function allowing neutrally variable scale elasticity. The results show that technical progress is characterized by a rapid increase in optimal scale and a small capital saving bias, increasing the...

This paper is concerned with the measurement of productive efficiency. Farrell's measures of efficiency are generalized to nonhomogeneous production functions. Several new measures of efficiency have been introduced and applied to the Swedish milk processing industry. The empirical analysis is...

Investigating the robustness of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis, this analysis incorporates two novel features. First, effective labor is modeled as the product of a quantity measure - number of employees with a given level of education - and a quality index, depending on, i.a.,...

The machine tool industry, even though it is tiny, is often considered strategic because of its role as supplier of technology to all metalworking industry. In recent years, the machine tool industry in Western countries has had to face major new challenges, especially in the form of new...