Agricultural production estimates have often differentiated and estimated different technologies within a sample of farms. The common approach is to use observable farm characteristics to split the sample into groups and subsequently estimate different functions for each group. Alternatively,...

We use nonparametric production function methods to decompose farm-level labor productivity growth into components attributable to efficiency change, technical change, and factor intensity. The estimation is accomplished using balanced panel data drawn from the Kansas Farm Management Association...

Cover page and table of contents for issue 41/2

This study estimates how potential carbon policies targeted at reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions could affect selection of rice cultivars by conducting a life cycle assessment of GHG emissions and estimating the carbon sequestered for fourteen commonly sown rice cultivars across...

In Finland, expanding dairy farms often face the problem of additional fields being geographically distant and only available as small parcels. We develop a stochastic production frontier model to estimate the technical efficiency of Finnish dairy farms and simulate the effect of parcel distance...

Estimating how the use of production contracts affects farm productivity is difficult when unobservable factors are correlated with both the decision to contract and productivity. To account for potential selection bias, this study uses the local availability of production contracts as an...

Competition from new store formats including supercenters, warehouse clubs, and mass merchandisers has emerged as a major threat to traditional grocery chains. A primary objective of this paper is to understand how the store-level performance is related to the workforce composition of full-time...

This article reviews and critiques the frontier literature dealing with farm level efficiency in developing countries. A total of 30 studies from 14 different countries are examined. The country that has received most attention is India, while rice has been the most studied agricultural product....

Traditional measures of productivity growth may not fully account for all sources of growth during the transition from conventional to alternative cropping systems. This paper treats soil quality as part of the production process and incorporates it directly into rotational measures of...

This study used 30 years of continuous data for 135 farms in Kansas to explore changes in productivity using Malmquist productivity indices (MPI). The indices were used to determine whether there was productivity convergence or divergence in Kansas farms. The results showed there was significant...